Sheila Heti Quotes

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

The portrait I do best is of the person I know best.

I write - though perhaps it sounds pretentious to say so - to make a clearing in the wilderness, to find out what I care about and what exactly to make of it.

In my book, I was trying to get into my own soul.

I've always written about things that cause me to feel something.

What I use when I'm acting comes from what I learn about myself.

It's important to be yourself. What art does for everyone, helps you understand yourself and in a distilled way, whether it's a painting or a scene in acting or a joke. It distills something about everyday life that can be important to you.

'M Train' is as close to knowing what I'm like as anything. I don't know exactly what the book is about. All and nothing, I suppose.

What you are is a question only you can answer.

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.

It's how I express myself - through storytelling and characters. They often reveal very intimate, vulnerable sides of myself.

Whatever character you play, it gives you the chance to expose another side of yourself that maybe you've never felt comfortable with, or never knew about.

Often I choose characters who express not my best self, but the sides of me I haven't developed or haven't expressed.

All writing is an act of self-exploration. Even a grocery list says something about you; how much more does a novel say?

The ultimate mystery is one's own self.

I want to get within myself and write. I really, really want to write.

Well, I think that in every character there are little bits and pieces of yourself.

My best writing has to do with an internal process that I'm working out unconsciously and put into my characters.

If I can write it, I can cope. And I've been writing many books, but in every book, I try to explore something in my own soul that I need to solve, I need to understand.

I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.

The reason I write is that I'm not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.

I'd had an early stint in acting school, and there was something satisfying about becoming a character, about being inside another mind that you had to create out of yourself. As I moved toward a life in writing, I found many of the things I'd learned in acting school still applied.

One of the things that I've come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is that I'm talking about myself.

Self-awareness is not self-centeredness, and spirituality is not narcissism. 'Know thyself' is not a narcissistic pursuit.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.