Emily Gould Quotes

#1. Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.

Emily Gould

#2. For her part, Amy Kev's Waffles with a passionate ferocity that she felt a little bit guilty about not being able to feel, most of the time, for humans. It probably helped that he was constantly doing cute shit and couldn't speak.

Emily Gould

#3. I would love it if my book was considered chick-lit or a beach read. That would be great. People would buy my book.

Emily Gould

#4. Relax, Amy, I'm not gay. I just like Sleater-Kinney. It's possible to like them and be heterosexual. It's not like I invited you to go see Tegan and Sara.

Emily Gould

#5. Elisa Albert in a nutshell: funny, self-aware, and genuinely fearless that she might be a lunatic, or a genius, or both.

Emily Gould

#6. She wondered if it counted as being good if you did the good thing for purely selfish reasons. Probably not, but who cared. What was important was what you did, not how you felt.

Emily Gould

#7. To some extent the shorter the writing assignment is, the harder it is to accomplish, and a blurb is 200 words max. Blurbs are meaningless, and actual people who are buying the books don't care about them at all.

Emily Gould

#8. If a woman writes about herself, she's a narcissist. If a man does the
same, he's describing the human condition. But people seem to evaluate
your work based on how much they relate to it, so it's like, well, who's
the narcissist?

Emily Gould

#9. No human walking the earth thinks of himself as a bullshitter.

Emily Gould

#10. When you write in the third person, you get to imagine other people's interiority.

Emily Gould

#11. Women especially are trained to protect other people's feelings, and a lot of that involves not telling the truth even about the fundamental details of your own experiences and your own life.

Emily Gould

#12. I think that genre distinctions basically boil down to marketing categories, which are outdated. Any time people have an argument about them, they're arguing about something that doesn't exist in any meaningful way that has to do with style or substance or actual content of books.

Emily Gould

#13. Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority.

Emily Gould

#14. Existential angst was far, far above her pay grade.

Emily Gould

#15. I think that people are generally really terrible at being ambassadors of their own work.

Emily Gould

#16. No one ever addresses the possibility that a writer might not like her book.

Emily Gould

#17. I don't think being a lawyer is more or less valuable than being a writer.

Emily Gould