Sheila Heti Quotes

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Sheila Heti

Profession : Writer

Birth : December 25, 1976

I find that when I'm in a relationship, I'm just so 'in it,' you couldn't even call it an art; it's such embroilment. With a friendship, you can choose a little bit more how to behave. You can be guided more.

Sheila Heti

You don't go to tarot readers or psychics when everything's going well. It's always evidence of rock-bottom.

Sheila Heti

When I was younger, I think that I felt like I could only live one way, and I had to figure out which of those one ways it was going to be. I have no anxiety about making the wrong decision.

Sheila Heti

In 'Sweet Days of Discipline,' the narrator, years after graduating, fortuitously encounters her old friend Frederique at a movie theatre. Frederique invites her home.

Sheila Heti

Our delusions of omniscience play a role in our ideas of not only what we want but also what we want to escape.

Sheila Heti

It's so weird how our existence hinges on just absolute crazy chance, but it feels so essential. It's like, 'Nothing would be here if you weren't here,' because you are the centre of your universe.

Sheila Heti

The reason I write is because I have questions. What I don't want is for people to forget that I'm a novelist and think I'm a sociologist or something. I don't want to feel trapped into a corner where I don't belong.

Sheila Heti

A woman will always be made to feel like a criminal, whatever choice she makes, however hard she tries. Mothers feel like criminals. Non-mothers do, too.

Sheila Heti

Toronto is my home. It's where my family is. I think I feel an obligation to be within subway distance of the people who raised me.

Sheila Heti

I saw what was wonderful about human companionship. Before that, I was quite content to be alone, to be a solitary wandering person, and I thought I always would be. Love changed that.

Sheila Heti

Raffi Cavoukian was born in Cairo in 1948 and moved with his Armenian parents to Toronto when he was 10.

Sheila Heti

There's so much anxiety about being understood - and being understood through what you wear.

Sheila Heti

I think making friends you can work with is a skill like any other, developing those particular kinds of intimacies. They're intimacies like any other, but they grow in a definite direction, not just willy-nilly like normal friendships.

Sheila Heti

There's something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children... What sort of trouble will she make?

Sheila Heti

Usually, you don't have commitment promises in a friendship. Usually, it just grows.

Sheila Heti

I remember where I was when I wrote that story, 'Mermaid in a Jar.' I was at a boyfriend's, and he was the only boy I ever dated who was rich, and his parents had a ski chalet, and I just didn't know how to break up with him, so I decided I would be celibate.

Sheila Heti

For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do.

Sheila Heti

I didn't wander into motherhood or nonmotherhood unconsciously, recklessly. I gave it due consideration.

Sheila Heti

For me, a memoir is supposed to be understood as a representation of your life, whereas a novel is self-consciously symbolic.

Sheila Heti

I believe there's a platonic ideal for every book that is written, like there's the perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether, and my job is to find what that book is through my editing.

Sheila Heti