Sheila Heti Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

He’s just another man who wants to teach me something.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.