Steven Heighton Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. The dreamtime of creative work is a turnstile to eternity. (from Workbok)

Steven Heighton

#5. Let failure be your workshop. See it for what is is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition. (from Workbook)

Steven Heighton

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

Steven Heighton

#7. Boredom is the laboratory where new enthusiasms prepare themselves,

Steven Heighton

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

Steven Heighton

#9. Love ... requires that you learn to read the lover in her own language, not translate her into yours.

Steven Heighton

#10. 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

#11. ...the one small wisdom he has gained from his life is that, when flags start to wave, someone must always refuse to join in.

Steven Heighton

#12. 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. (from Workbook)

Steven Heighton

#13. 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

#14. We were made to get along, to be together, and
it's a truth that's medically attested... Love and dance and connection strengthen every bodily system, while isolation, rage and sadness poison them with cortisol.

Steven Heighton

#15. 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

#16. It's no sin to tell a good story.

Steven Heighton

#17. 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