Sheila Heti Quotes

Author Image

Sheila Heti

Profession : Writer

Birth : December 25, 1976

I don't think about the reader when I'm writing, but I do when I'm editing, of course. For instance, I self-consciously didn't want to do anything to increase the divide between mothers and nonmothers - I think that divide is so horrible and destructive and unnecessary.

Sheila Heti

Renown is something people have always wanted, but maybe what's modern is that it's considered a virtue, this desire, rather than a vice. I might be wrong about this.

Sheila Heti

Writing, for me, when I'm writing in the first-person, is like a form of acting. So as I'm writing, the character or self I'm writing about and my whole self - when I began the book - become entwined. It's soon hard to tell them apart. The voice I'm trying to explore directs my own perceptions and thoughts.

Sheila Heti

Trying to live the image of the life which you have in your head... it's really hard not to do that, but I do think maybe it's cheating.

Sheila Heti

Everyone's always telling themselves stories about their lives, writers or not.

Sheila Heti

There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life's meaning. There can be sadness at not living out a more universal story - the supposed life cycle.

Sheila Heti

Sometimes you can't write a novel for weeks and weeks, but it's good for your self-esteem to work on something else.

Sheila Heti

I don't know what that line is between fiction and non-fiction that other people have in their minds, but to me, when I'm writing, it's just like whatever the next sentence should be is the next sentence. It's not this artificial division.

Sheila Heti

I've always had individual friends, but I didn't find the people I wanted to learn from as an adult until my mid-twenties.

Sheila Heti

Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances!

Sheila Heti

Nonfiction, to me, feels like an argument, whereas a novel is like a series of questions.

Sheila Heti

Women without children can help mothers, and we can just be all in this together.

Sheila Heti

You think you're writing the most important book, you think you're writing the most stupid book, and you never really know before it's done that it's going to be done.

Sheila Heti

If you want to write from life, you can't really write a story. People are always changing, and I think if we didn't look the same day-to-day, and our self weren't always in our body, would we even be the same? The continuity is in our bodies.

Sheila Heti

When you're writing, I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. You're dealing with emotions and thoughts that are native to you. So that probably winds up in your characters.

Sheila Heti

Many of the traits in my characters are exaggerations of things I see in myself. But in 'How Should a Person Be?' I wasn't trying to write about myself so much as a combination of myself and these women I was seeing in our culture.

Sheila Heti

I just always felt whole when I was writing. I felt this kind of beautiful privacy that I never felt in any other way. I feel like there's this great fullness to being alone, and writing is a really vivid way and a really magical way of being alone.

Sheila Heti

Writing makes everything else in my life okay; it makes everything make sense.

Sheila Heti

Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy.

Sheila Heti

A daughter is more difficult than a rose.

Sheila Heti