Sheila Heti Quotes

#1. I am obsessed with shopping for secondhand clothing. Nobody else has it, and it has a story that comes with it.

Sheila Heti

#2. Better to have your failure right in front of you than the fantasy in your head.

Sheila Heti

#3. If now in some ways I drink too much, it's not that I lack a reverence for the world.

Sheila Heti

#4. It has long been known to me that certain objects want you as much as you want them. These are the ones that become important, the objects that you hold dear. The others fade from your life entirely. You wanted them, but they did not want you in return.

Sheila Heti

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Somehow I had turned myself into the worst thing in the world: I was just another man who wanted to teach me something!

Sheila Heti

#8. He's just another man who wants to teach me something.

Sheila Heti

#9. Women's fiction doesn't sound like anything but a slur to my ears.

Sheila Heti

#10. All I'm saying is: if there's a pool and people are in the pool and you're not in the pool, you want to be in the pool just like those people in the pool. It's just a fact of nature.

Sheila Heti

#11. Boundaries, Sheila. Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them.

Sheila Heti

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. I always had a fantasy of meeting a girl who was as serious as I was.

Sheila Heti

#15. Perhaps our vision of how life should be is actually no fun at all, and neglects to include the exciting people we have yet to meet, who make the stupid ways life seems to happen, happy after all.

Sheila Heti

#16. In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful.

Sheila Heti

#17. 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

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

Sheila Heti

#19. 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

#20. It's fun to give pleasure to people.

Sheila Heti

#21. 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

#22. Life is not a harvest. Just because you have an apple doesn't mean you have an orchard. You have an apple. Put a fence around it. Once you have put a fence around everything you value, then you have the total circle of your heart.

Sheila Heti

#23. Had anyone suggested at the time that it would not be the Egypt of the pharaohs that would survive and change the moral landscape of the world, but instead a group of Hebrew slaves, it would have seemed the ultimate absurdity.

Sheila Heti

#24. That was it. She came out of it. She never had such a down as that or such an up as the three days that preceded it, not ever again in her life. The rest of her life was like a long thin line with little diminuendos and tiny little crescendos, and friends visiting from out of town.

Sheila Heti

#25. There are certain people who do not feel like they were raised by wolves, and they are the ones who make the world tick. They are the ones who keep everything functioning so the rest of us can worry about what sort of person we should be.

Sheila Heti

#26. Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.

Sheila Heti

#27. 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

#28. Aside from blow jobs, though, I'm through with being the perfect girlfriend, just through with it. Then if he's sore with me, let him dump my ass. That will just give me more time to be a genius.

Sheila Heti

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

Sheila Heti

#30. It is their everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, not what they choose

Sheila Heti

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

Sheila Heti

#32. I felt like I was the tin man, the lion, and the scarecrow in one: I could not feel my heart, I had no courage, I could not use my brain,

Sheila Heti

#33. You have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.

Sheila Heti

#34. I know that character exists from the outside alone. I know that inside the body there's just temperature.

Sheila Heti

#35. 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

#36. It's so hard to live that one needs a support around life. We can't live without some supernatural support.

Sheila Heti

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. A problem I've always had with fashion magazines is that women are encouraged to copy other women. While I suspect that many men enjoy copying other men (consider the idea of the alpha male and beta males), and while part of what makes a man "superior" is how close he can get to "embodying manliness

Sheila Heti

#40. 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

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

Sheila Heti

#42. My parents are both scientists, and I was raised without god.

Sheila Heti

#43. I like the jellyfish because it has no brain or heart. It's just a thing that takes in the ocean through its mouth. I like that kind of ambition and simplicity.

Sheila Heti

#44. I do feel it. And I've felt it my whole life, that the supernatural has a role in the world.

Sheila Heti

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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