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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

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Sheila Heti
Age: 47
Born: 1976
Born: December 25
Novelist
Writer
City of Toronto
Persons
Person
Trying
Interviewed
Going
Edit
Really
Edits
Think
Responding
Thinking
Mistake
People
Bigs

More quotes by Sheila Heti

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Somehow I had turned myself into the worst thing in the world: I was just another man who wanted to teach me something!
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I've always had individual friends, but I didn't find the people I wanted to learn from as an adult until my midtwenties.
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It's nice to go into your doom. It's so liberating.
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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.
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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
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Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.
Sheila Heti
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He’s just another man who wants to teach me something.
Sheila Heti
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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
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We tried not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time.
Sheila Heti
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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
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It's so hard to live that one needs a support around life. We can't live without some supernatural support.
Sheila Heti
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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.
Sheila Heti
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I always had a fantasy of meeting a girl who was as serious as I was.
Sheila Heti
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I do feel it. And I've felt it my whole life, that the supernatural has a role in the world.
Sheila Heti
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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
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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
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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
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You have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.
Sheila Heti
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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
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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