Heidi Julavits Quotes

#1. We want to believe we couldn't be replaced, and that the people we love are irreplaceable.

Heidi Julavits

#2. A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything.

Heidi Julavits

#3. But as with so may diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.

Heidi Julavits

#4. I don't usually read my reviews. I've noticed older reviewers are much more bothered by the plot complications. Younger reviews don't seem to be bothered by the complications at all.

Heidi Julavits

#5. I used to have a really sharp memory. And its loss has proven destabilizing from an identity perspective.

Heidi Julavits

#6. I love this idea of the body as a trauma archive!

Heidi Julavits

#7. Usually I'll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don't think out the plot ahead of time.

Heidi Julavits

#8. During the summers, when I'm in Maine, I work at a desk that's located beyond all tendrilly wi-fi reaches. It takes me a few days to break the constant e-mail-checking habit, then I find I don't want to check my e-mail ever, and often don't for days.

Heidi Julavits

#9. My friend did not want her suspicion - which sustained the possibility that her husband both was and was not having an affair - to disappear by exposing it.

Heidi Julavits

#10. I reread books to measure my degree of difference from myself.

Heidi Julavits

#11. I used to be as scared of public speaking as I was of sharks. Every time I teach I get an endorphin high off the fact that I did not have a panic attack. I teach and swim in order to measure my improvement as a human. I am no longer terrified of quite so many things.

Heidi Julavits

#12. I wouldn't be myself if I weren't always trying to be someone else. I only have so much time on this earth and I want to be as many people as possible.

Heidi Julavits

#13. When I was writing my first draft, and feeling grandiose, I e-mailed an artist/clothing designer I know and suggested we collaborate on a fashion line inspired by the outfits my characters wore. I regret that we never did that.

Heidi Julavits

#14. I buy a lot of books I've found via the Internet, whose existences I'd otherwise never have known about.

Heidi Julavits

#15. I don't think women are, by definition, toxic to one another. I think women are simultaneously competitive toward and idolatrous of each other. I thrive on that challenge and that desire.

Heidi Julavits

#16. I'm at that age where I notice friends checking out my face and wondering, Has she been Botoxed? There's a new map there people that are trying to read. I think if I did get any kind of enhancement I would be very public about it. I don't want people wondering - I want them to know.

Heidi Julavits

#17. I enjoy a misogynist so long as they have a wicked sense of humor and know, on some level, that they're pigs. This is why I enjoy Philip Roth but not Saul Bellow or James Salter.

Heidi Julavits

#18. To believe you're being psychically attacked gives you an understanding of your illness that no Western doctor can provide; this can be reassuring when you've exhausted the Western doctor tool kit, and the doctors are sending you to acupuncturists for pain relief.

Heidi Julavits

#19. I won't deny that I have a far more productive writing life without the Internet, mostly because I rekindle my ability to concentrate on one thing for a period of longer than three minutes. My curiosity is channeled inward rather than Internet-ward.

Heidi Julavits

#20. I wish somebody knew whether or not I'm Jewish.

Heidi Julavits

#21. I've subsequently become conscious of MAKING MEMORIES. Which makes me sound like a scrapbooker.

Heidi Julavits

#22. I think female-female relationships interest me so much more because they're so encoded. There is kind of a psychic element that happens within groups of women.

Heidi Julavits

#23. I developed a crazy face rash after I got engaged to a guy I must have known somewhere I should not marry. I hadn't articulated this to myself, so my face told the world instead.

Heidi Julavits

#24. Worrying about originality is like worrying about the best place to hang your wall phone.

Heidi Julavits

#25. The sensation felt like spinning too fast on a merry-go-round. Each fraction of a second her eyes focused on a new face in a crowd. Within seconds the face was gone, whisked to a blur, replaced by another face that would just as soon be lost.

Heidi Julavits

#26. I obviously read and adore traditional fiction. I teach traditional fiction; I also teach all kinds of not-so-traditional fiction.

Heidi Julavits

#27. No one was around to publicly shame me, but I am perfectly able to shame myself. And worse -- around myself it is not a matter of appearing to be stupid and heartless; instead I confirm to myself that I am definitively one or the other.

Heidi Julavits

#28. Whether I'm writing about plumbers or psychics or psychic plumbers, I want to find a creative space that imprisons me usefully, so I can deviate with purpose.

Heidi Julavits

#29. No matter what you wear, not everyone is going to understand what you're saying.

Heidi Julavits

#30. In parks, when people veer from the established paths and cut new ones through the grass, these are called "desire lines." Many people have the same desire when it comes to walking, which implies that we all want to get to the same place, and more quickly.

Heidi Julavits

#31. The twisty nature of psychic attack - are you being attacked, or did you bring this attack on yourself? - speaks to me of an American cultural paradox we all grapple with. There's the rampant litigiousness of our society, and the desire to blame others for our misfortunes.

Heidi Julavits

#32. When you are expending much energy on someone else's demise, it's like you weaken your psychic immune system.

Heidi Julavits

#33. The dreamed outcome of launching a psychic attack can make you feel small and petty. I think for that reason I'm going to refrain from launching any.

Heidi Julavits

#34. Maybe the body is taking responsibility where the mind is not. It's scrapbooking for us.

Heidi Julavits

#35. I am simply looking for a companion with whom to spend my days, a companion who will cherish as much as I the stupidity of living in the moment, and spend every dull, amazing second with me.

Heidi Julavits

#36. If, at some future point, my face collapses around my eyes, I'd probably do something about it. My eyes are where I live, and if people couldn't see them, no one would know me.

Heidi Julavits

#37. I surround myself with women who inspire me to be more ambitious, and who constantly astonish me with their magnetism, style, and smarts.

Heidi Julavits

#38. I spend far too much time on eBay buying lamps and upholstery remnants.

Heidi Julavits

#39. As such, anything is always possible, even if your protagonist is a plumber. But it's the possibility, the limitless possibilities, of any fake life, that make writing about it so challenging.

Heidi Julavits

#40. Sometimes it can be useful to read your bad reviews.

Heidi Julavits

#41. In the midst of such uncertainty, I cling not to what I know, but what I feel.

Heidi Julavits

#42. I guess what I find so interesting about memory, and its role in a person's identity, is how the attempt to achieve accuracy requires you to remove yourself from your life in an authorial manner.

Heidi Julavits

#43. I really did for a few weeks think, I'm in pain because the world needs me to save it. Which is so ridiculous and egotistical.

Heidi Julavits

#44. Women are responsible for the people in the family having pants.

Heidi Julavits

#45. My behavior makes perfect sense to me.

Heidi Julavits

#46. It's fascinating to imagine two successful writers in one house. But when you think about it, it isn't very unusual. In fact, so many writers have writer spouses.

Heidi Julavits

#47. The belief that one's suffering has a greater cosmic purpose, and is thus more exciting and more noble, well, it made a lot of sense to me.

Heidi Julavits

#48. Whenever I hang out with my female friends, I feel like context is never needed. They can just say two words about something, it's like hearing the first two notes of a song and you can always identify the song. They can just say a word and I know exactly what they're talking about.

Heidi Julavits

#49. Some people just make me feel mentally endangered. Whatever dark stuff is going on in their head, it's coming at me and I need to escape.

Heidi Julavits

#50. I've always said that you were too smart to have a profession. Smart people are hopeless in the face of anything actual. They are terrible cooks. They cannot dress themselves. They are children who need guidance and protecting.

Heidi Julavits

#51. A white girl disappears from a white prep school in a white suburb. Nobody knows what happened to her. The overall whiteness of the world is threatened. This must be resolved by whatever means possible.

Heidi Julavits

#52. There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they've thought it through beforehand. Whereas I'll finish a first draft and I'm nowhere near done.

Heidi Julavits

#53. Every once in a while when I get a migraine, I like to think, "Who hates me today?"

Heidi Julavits

#54. You should never read online comments if you want to keep thoughts above the belt.

Heidi Julavits

#55. We're not saints, any of us. Maybe somebody is, but I don't know those people. But we all know people who behave very smugly and are very egotistical and put you down as a manner of improving their own place in the world or improving their own place in the world.

Heidi Julavits

#56. You know you're screwed when a Western doctor recommends acupuncture.

Heidi Julavits

#57. When I write, I am trying through the movement of my fingers to reach my head. I'm trying to build a word ladder up to my brain.

Heidi Julavits

#58. Set a good example. Want to fuck yourself so that others want to fuck you too.

Heidi Julavits

#59. I go through life now reminding myself to remember something, and I do this while that something is happening. I'll be experiencing a moment and I'll say to myself, "Remember this!" Otherwise my whole life just blurs by.

Heidi Julavits

#60. My husband is always accusing me of being a context-free individual. He asks something and he has no idea where it came from or what it related to. I have to supply him with way more supplementary information than I ever have to supply my female friends.

Heidi Julavits

#61. I don't think fake people living in a fake house in a fake suburb are any less dismissible or believable than a fake psychic attending a fake school in a fake town. Nothing's inherently believable about any kind of fiction, because all of it's untrue.

Heidi Julavits

#62. If I can just stop being so stressed out, maybe my cancer will get better! This is far less scary than treating a disease of unknown etiology.

Heidi Julavits

#63. When my husband first read a draft, he said, "You spend too much time describing the characters' outfits." He was right. I removed much of the clothes talk, but quite a bit remained.

Heidi Julavits

#64. At a certain point, it seems more polite to just become the person people assume you to be.

Heidi Julavits

#65. I take you for a girl who's eager to grow unstable at the first indication that things can come back to haunt a person, even after she has given them up for dead.

Heidi Julavits

#66. I needed to understand this random bad bit of luck as part of a bigger design. Otherwise I was suffering meaninglessly. This made the suffering a lot worse.

Heidi Julavits

#67. Structure is, for me, the most fun challenge about writing novels.

Heidi Julavits

#68. Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. In other words: Home has exceedingly low standards.

Heidi Julavits

#69. If I'd done the discovery before I wrote the book, then there would be nothing to discover. It would feel dutiful instead of exciting.

Heidi Julavits

#70. I think what can be most shameful or embarrassing is when our bodies broadcast a secret we'd prefer no one to know. This is why I hate rashes, in particular face rashes.

Heidi Julavits

#71. I calmed myself by walking into my nearby bookstore and marveling at all the books other people had written. So many people had finished and published novels; it couldn't be so hard, right?

Heidi Julavits

#72. As a writer, you want to go somewhere else sometimes. You want to vary the terrain that you're exploring.

Heidi Julavits

#73. I always think it's useful to get an outside opinion.

Heidi Julavits

#74. But girls . . . girls, mishandled, are a menace.

Heidi Julavits