Steven Heighton

Professions :

Born :

August 14, 1961

Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them.

Steven Heighton

luck writing may

To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)

Steven Heighton

stranger self-esteem heart

The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir... by Steven Heighton

The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.

Steven Heighton

willingness idiot sides

Cast a spell and the small flaws don't matter. (From Workbook) by Steven Heighton

Cast a spell and the small flaws don't matter. (From Workbook)

Steven Heighton

casts flaws matter

It's no sin to tell a good story. by Steven Heighton

It's no sin to tell a good story.

Steven Heighton

good-story sin stories

Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.

Steven Heighton

avoid touch always experience

I had a book of essays out in 1997 in which I talked about the increasing virtuality of our lives. I've always been afraid of that in my own life.

Steven Heighton

own my-own life book

I'm supportive of practical nationalism, like the kind we need in Canada to avoid being absorbed into a much larger country. The kind of nationalism I despise as destructive and infantile is really just tribalism writ large.

Steven Heighton

need nationalism canada country

I've been a traveller, but I don't travel so much now. I'm trying to do it vicariously through my writing. I'm trying to write books that will draw readers away from their lives but send them back in a more awakened way.

Steven Heighton

will writing way travel

I used to be more of a purist about literature. I thought, 'If it's a really propulsive story, then maybe there's something unliterary about it.'

Steven Heighton

something story thought literature

It gets too easy to write from the point of view of a male character of my age, with the same cultural frame of reference.

Steven Heighton

view age easy character

Adam Johnson

Ivan Goncharov

Binnie Kirshenbaum

Bruce Jay Friedman

Buchi Emecheta

Bryce Courtenay