Lynn Coady Quotes
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It's kind of sad, the way we've turned the entertainment of reading into a kind of psychic broccoli - something to feel guilty about if you don't force it on your face-making children while dutifully consuming a few token florets yourself.
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The thing about relationships is, the stronger they get, the more rapidly the realm of romance starts to overlap with the domestic.
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Let's not confuse traditional behaviours with good manners. The definition of etiquette is gender neutral - it simply means we strive at all times to ensure a person in our company feels at ease.
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Occasionally, chewing over some random letter writer's dilemma, I'll find myself imagining scenarios where the problem could be sidestepped by an innocent fib or series of evasive manoeuvres. Then, I slap myself on the wrist.
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My dad was a real man's man, and so were my brothers, in a small town where hockey is king. It's a masculine culture. It made me really attentive to what it meant to be a guy.
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I come from a working-class background, and I thought I had to be studying something that would get me a job.
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I should say I am not much of a gamer - anymore. The reason for this is that I have to make a living, and my body requires vitamin D, and I've come to value the heady pleasures of human interaction over the temporary exhilaration of reaching the 'next level.'
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One does not become an atheist out of a desire for hassle-free Sunday mornings. People come to atheism because they have a problem with organized religion - usually a problem they consider to be of moral urgency.
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We allow ourselves to unclench when we're home with our families, which is one of the truly wonderful advantages of human intimacy.
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There are people out there who genuinely love literature, who genuinely love to read and read widely, who will never like, or even necessarily get, my books. That was a hard one to swallow, to not feel slighted by.
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Loneliness sucks. It's a slog. It feels wonderful and exhilarating when someone makes it go away. But love is a whole different ball game.
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Flowers are an easy, eloquent expression of love at a time when words can seem clumsy and inadequate.
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You can't really go into TV thinking, 'Maybe I can make a few bucks doing this thing I'm only kind of interested in to support my one true love, which is prose fiction.' I think you have to love what you're doing to do it well.
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I think authors like me are always struggling with the idea that they should have a brand and a Facebook author page and they should get Twitter accounts. I don't know what to do with them.
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No one expects the doormat to stand upright, shake itself off, and amble down the street to seek its own happiness.
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Now, as a writer, the whole world is your nail polish display, and what's more, you can help yourself. A thrilling, colourful array of gorgeous human peculiarity revolves before your eyes, and you still can't quite believe it's all yours for the taking.
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Audience participation can often inject a dose of adrenalin into your average dial-tone literary reading, especially if a handful of audience-members are mentally unhinged, and let's face it - you can always depend on at least one crackpot at these things.
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I know what the Giller nominee effect is, but we'll see what the next level is.
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It's doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista.
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When writing sex scenes, there is often no pleasing anyone, except perhaps the writer herself.
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I just have to trust that the story is going to shake out in such a way that's going to be palatable to readers.
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Sometimes I pine for the era of Miss Manners, when there were hard and fast rules dictating a well-bred individual's behaviour in any given situation.
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It's a moral absolute: If you are going to make a human being, you have a fundamental responsibility to that person - to honestly disclose exactly who they are and where they come from.
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I've always been a sucker for any technology engineered primarily for the entertainment of the human race - even such technology as has been disguised as 'useful' or 'improving' when we all know the real virtue lies in its ability to distract and divert.