Lynn Coady Quotes
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Atheism is a moral position - a rather rigid one, if you've ever read the opinions of its highest-profile espousers, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.
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That's all small talk is - a quick way to connect on a human level - which is why it is by no means as irrelevant as the people who are bad at it insist. In short, it's worth making the effort.
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I spent so many years in terror of 'making it legal' because the expression rang all too true - the wedding ritual struck me as nothing but a flowery front for the fulfilment of countless, tedious contracts and obligations.
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To buy dinner transmits that you feel time spent in your date's company has been a pleasure and a privilege.
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You know the actor's nightmare is getting up onstage and not being prepared? I think the writer's nightmare is giving a reading and somebody standing up and saying, 'That's not your story.'
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Dating, like almost every other male-female interaction in present-day society, is based on outmoded and unequal social roles and expectations.
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When a man tells a woman there is no chance of a formal, committed, long-term relationship, the only self-respecting response is to take him at his word and move on.
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Something I've always written about is social expectations: that the eyes of the community are on you all the time, expecting you to line up with certain social norms, certain behaviours. Whenever you forgot about them, they'd be strongly reiterated to you, in no uncertain terms.
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I was always watching the boys and how they interacted. It comes with being a feminist, just somebody who thinks a lot about gender and how it plays out in society.
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While Person A might believe the kitchen counter provides a reasonable surface on which to place one's balled-up sweatsocks post-gym, Person B - about to cut up some vegetables on that same counter, perhaps for a meal intended to be shared with Person A - can only read the sockball as a message that says, 'Hi! I have contempt for you!'
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I don't even like to cry in private.
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Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative - readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next.
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I went into the world confident my tea training would open many doors. And I did particularly well with the Irish and fellow Nova Scotians over 60. But this only got me so far. It took a long time to cultivate the tricks of easy social interaction.
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I would just randomly blurt out things like, 'What if a man showed up today and was carrying an umbrella, but it wasn't raining?' Eventually, people started to call me weird.
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However long, it's definitely the presence of other people that brings out the weirdness - that collision of your own way of being with the everyday lives of others, the abrupt awareness - always a surprise no matter how often it's happened - that their lives are very different from your own.
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What I've learned is that you get better at writing by writing, and that 'youthful energy' will only get you so far.
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I even felt like I liked guys better than women - that men were relevant and women weren't. It took me a while to realize I'd been socialized to have a slighting view of my own gender.
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We thought we'd name the magazine for the number of bridges within Edmonton's city limits. We thought this number was 18. Much later, we learned that the number is actually 21. But we didn't like the sound of that so much.
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Filtering can be a very good thing when it comes to human relationships and familial harmony. Yeah, filtering is often an absolute necessity.
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The fundamentals for me are character and conflict. I put character first because readers will be indifferent to conflict if they are indifferent to the character who is experiencing it.
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Literary readings aren't going to shake their reputation as the added-fibre of our entertainment diet until the people who organize and participate in them snap out of this mentality.
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The creative process taps into our deepest subconscious, and we are each of us sex-crazed - products of a shame-based Judeo-Christian culture that has irrevocably warped us all to varying degrees.
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I really do think of it in moral terms. I think that we can't kid ourselves that the storytelling impulse is innocent and does nothing but bring good to the world.
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It's the typical mid-life crisis kind of thing, where you just stop and wonder, 'Should I go back to university and get a law degree?' I kind of looked around me and thought, 'What kind of idiot am I that I've just spent the last 10 years writing novels? Financially, I'm pretty much where I was when I was 28.'