I feel like one can have all of that as a writer; you're writing, you're reading, you're talking to interesting and intelligent people. Your life is structured around whatever book you're writing, and so is your reading and so are many of your conversations.

Sheila Heti

Categorized in : Book Writing Reading

One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me.

Sheila Heti

women example looks

I spend most of my time in my head. You can always work out solutions and satisfactions there. Maybe you can't actually bring them about, but there's usually a pleasant pillow of time between imagining you can, and realizing you cannot.

Sheila Heti

work-out satisfaction thinking

We don't know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.

Sheila Heti

effects knows

To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life.

Sheila Heti

soul missing goes-on

Literature and art are one of a number of relationships I have with the world. Like you have relationships with your friends and a relationship with your lover and your relationship with your family and your relationship with your work - sometimes it's really great; sometimes it's non-existent, sometimes it's fruitful.

Sheila Heti

literature numbers art

It's nice to go into your doom. It's so liberating.

Sheila Heti

liberating doom nice

There was not an awareness of pop culture in the household. There was a lot of respect for working hard, and for intellectual and professional achievement.

Sheila Heti

achievement intellectual culture

Maybe that's good to not feel like you have to keep up when there's so much to keep up with right now. It's bottomless.

Sheila Heti

like-you right-now feels

There's so much writing I could have done and so many ideas that I had and so many things I wanted to work on that I didn't. I like too much having things in my head rather than doing the work.

Sheila Heti

done writing ideas

We tried not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time.

Sheila Heti

bores-you waste men

I kind of try to resist working a lot. I'm not a very disciplined worker.

Sheila Heti

working-a-lot kind trying

There are times when things are clear in your head and your heart and everything comes all aligned and it's easy and it just feels good to do something. But most of the time it's not like that. Most of the time there's conflict between your head and your heart.

Sheila Heti

conflict feel-good heart

In the transcribing and the editing, you want some retention of how the person speaks - you don't want to edit out all of the hesitations and idiosyncrasies. And to get people to say something they've never said before. That's big.

Sheila Heti

editing want people

Sometimes you do have people who are great at curating; sometimes you have people curating who don't know what they're do.

Sheila Heti

knows sometimes people

When I was in high school, and even to a degree while I was in university, I wasn't on the Internet. So it's not as embedded in my soul, that kind of way of being.

Sheila Heti

degrees soul school

I'm in a serious monogamous relationship, and I don't want to keep having different boyfriends, and I have this instead - with men and women. It's better. Instead of having sex, we have art.

Sheila Heti

men sex art

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

Sheila Heti

individual adults people

I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn't worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn't have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing.

Sheila Heti

class philosophy art

I think a lot of people try to edit themselves out and I think that's a big mistake, because the person being interviewed is responding to a person, and if you don't know who that person is then you don't really know what's going on with the person being interviewed.

Sheila Heti

mistake people thinking

When I'm editing, I try to bring out some dramatic structure. I think it is about theater in some way; it is a little play.

Sheila Heti

editing play thinking