This is not necessarily the answer people want, but ultimately, I think writing is an amoral process. Your ultimate responsibility is to the truth of the story you’re trying to tell. – Lynn Coady
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. – Lynn Coady
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. – Lynn Coady
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. – Lynn Coady
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. – Lynn Coady
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.’ – Lynn Coady
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. – Lynn Coady
I avoid writing about sex out of a certainty that no matter how grown up and matter-of-fact I might try to be, there is a snickering yet nun-terrorized 12-year-old-boy inside me who would at some point be certain to grab the reins in his hairy palms. – Lynn Coady
What I’ve learned is that you get better at writing by writing, and that ‘youthful energy’ will only get you so far. – Lynn Coady
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. – Lynn Coady
You can’t hint a man into bestowing the ideal gift that displays all the love, appreciation and understanding you feel is lacking the rest of year. – Lynn Coady
I decided a long time ago to be myself and not worry too much about cultivating some kind of personality that didn’t feel natural or true to who I am. – Lynn Coady
I started out in the journalism program, but I got kicked out. I wasn’t very good at it. It wasn’t where I wanted to be ultimately. – Lynn Coady
As a novelist, you have to pick your battles. You are tired. You have begun to experience the first ominous tinglings of carpal tunnel syndrome. You wake up in the middle of the night with both hands lying across your chest like a couple of plucked bird carcasses, dead of all sensation. – Lynn Coady
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. – Lynn Coady
Never use dogs to symbolize anything. That is ridiculous. Always ensure that any dogs are just dogs; i.e., characters in the story who happen to be dogs. – Lynn Coady
The novel, as a genre, was once considered a diversion every bit as frivolous as Facebook, but over the years, we’ve managed to convince ourselves that reading fiction is as important to our mental digestion as fresh fruits and vegetables are to the processes that take place a little further down. – Lynn Coady
No matter how committed a marriage, there will always be other people – those we have chemistry with and those we don’t, those we are attracted to, and those who shop for functional outdoors wear. The sooner a couple can accept the existence of the former and exchange a few basic reassurances concerning them, the easier life gets. – Lynn Coady
Guys know how to read each other’s signals. They know how to telegraph love for one another without throwing their arms around one another. – Lynn Coady
Most don’t live inside their heads as a writer does, having conversations with her own ideas. – Lynn Coady
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.’ – Lynn Coady
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. – Lynn Coady
One day it hit me: Truest friends, God bless their hearts, could not care less. They love you, they’re pleased you’re getting married and, ultimately, they don’t give a fig how you get it done. – Lynn Coady
The process of writing a story isn’t about fair. It’s about getting to the heart of your story, getting to the truth of it. It transcends ideals of fair and unfair, right and wrong. – Lynn Coady
There was a time when I thought dudes had friendship all figured out. The focus on eating things in front of giant screens, pretending to punch one another, competing over who can utter the grossest and most profane personal insults imaginable – this struck me as the very apex of human social exchange. – Lynn Coady
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.’ – Lynn Coady
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. – Lynn Coady
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. – Lynn Coady
