Top 60 Heidi Julavits Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “As a writer, you want to go somewhere else sometimes. You want to vary the terrain that you’re exploring.”

— Heidi Julavits

2. “Worrying about originality is like worrying about the best place to hang your wall phone.”

— Heidi Julavits

3. “If I can just stop being so stressed out, maybe my cancer will get better! This is far less scary than treating a disease of unknown etiology.”

— Heidi Julavits

4. “I wouldn’t be myself if I weren’t always trying to be someone else. I only have so much time on this earth and I want to be as many people as possible.”

— Heidi Julavits

5. “I surround myself with women who inspire me to be more ambitious, and who constantly astonish me with their magnetism, style, and smarts.”

— Heidi Julavits

6. “The twisty nature of psychic attack – are you being attacked, or did you bring this attack on yourself? – speaks to me of an American cultural paradox we all grapple with. There’s the rampant litigiousness of our society, and the desire to blame others for our misfortunes.”

— Heidi Julavits

7. “I don’t think fake people living in a fake house in a fake suburb are any less dismissible or believable than a fake psychic attending a fake school in a fake town. Nothing’s inherently believable about any kind of fiction, because all of it’s untrue.”

— Heidi Julavits

8. “No matter what you wear, not everyone is going to understand what you’re saying.”

— Heidi Julavits

9. “I wish somebody knew whether or not I’m Jewish.”

— Heidi Julavits

10. “You should never read online comments if you want to keep thoughts above the belt.”

— Heidi Julavits

11. “My husband is always accusing me of being a context-free individual. He asks something and he has no idea where it came from or what it related to. I have to supply him with way more supplementary information than I ever have to supply my female friends.”

— Heidi Julavits

12. “In the midst of such uncertainty, I cling not to what I know, but what I feel.”

— Heidi Julavits

13. “I don’t think women are, by definition, toxic to one another. I think women are simultaneously competitive toward and idolatrous of each other. I thrive on that challenge and that desire.”

— Heidi Julavits

14. “I am simply looking for a companion with whom to spend my days, a companion who will cherish as much as I the stupidity of living in the moment, and spend every dull, amazing second with me.”

— Heidi Julavits

15. “I needed to understand this random bad bit of luck as part of a bigger design. Otherwise I was suffering meaninglessly. This made the suffering a lot worse.”

— Heidi Julavits

16. “We want to believe we couldn’t be replaced, and that the people we love are irreplaceable.”

— Heidi Julavits

17. “Some people just make me feel mentally endangered. Whatever dark stuff is going on in their head, it’s coming at me and I need to escape.”

— Heidi Julavits

18. “The sensation felt like spinning too fast on a merry-go-round. Each fraction of a second her eyes focused on a new face in a crowd. Within seconds the face was gone, whisked to a blur, replaced by another face that would just as soon be lost.”

— Heidi Julavits

19. “A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything.”

— Heidi Julavits

20. “Structure is, for me, the most fun challenge about writing novels.”

— Heidi Julavits

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21. “I’ve subsequently become conscious of MAKING MEMORIES. Which makes me sound like a scrapbooker.”

— Heidi Julavits

22. “Every once in a while when I get a migraine, I like to think, “Who hates me today?””

— Heidi Julavits

23. “It’s fascinating to imagine two successful writers in one house. But when you think about it, it isn’t very unusual. In fact, so many writers have writer spouses.”

— Heidi Julavits

24. “You know you’re screwed when a Western doctor recommends acupuncture.”

— Heidi Julavits

25. “To be melancholy is to be self-haunted, and among the many reasons this is an unsatisfactory explanation for living inside a jam jar inside an aquarium, foremost among them is that there are no good stories to tell of your bleak time in a beautiful place, and no specter to blame for the fact that happiness, though it should have been inescapable, evaded you.”

— Heidi Julavits

26. “We’re not saints, any of us. Maybe somebody is, but I don’t know those people. But we all know people who behave very smugly and are very egotistical and put you down as a manner of improving their own place in the world or improving their own place in the world.”

— Heidi Julavits

27. “The dreamed outcome of launching a psychic attack can make you feel small and petty. I think for that reason I’m going to refrain from launching any.”

— Heidi Julavits

28. “I want the plot to be as complicated as possible. Usually I’ll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don’t think out the plot ahead of time.”

— Heidi Julavits

29. “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. In other words: Home has exceedingly low standards.”

— Heidi Julavits

30. “Whenever I hang out with my female friends, I feel like context is never needed. They can just say two words about something, it’s like hearing the first two notes of a song and you can always identify the song. They can just say a word and I know exactly what they’re talking about.”

— Heidi Julavits

31. “I think what can be most shameful or embarrassing is when our bodies broadcast a secret we’d prefer no one to know. This is why I hate rashes, in particular face rashes.”

— Heidi Julavits

32. “I’ve always said that you were too smart to have a profession. Smart people are hopeless in the face of anything actual. They are terrible cooks. They cannot dress themselves. They are children who need guidance and protecting.”

— Heidi Julavits

33. “As such, anything is always possible, even if your protagonist is a plumber. But it’s the possibility, the limitless possibilities, of any fake life, that make writing about it so challenging.”

— Heidi Julavits

34. “If, at some future point, my face collapses around my eyes, I’d probably do something about it. My eyes are where I live, and if people couldn’t see them, no one would know me.”

— Heidi Julavits

35. “I really did for a few weeks think, I’m in pain because the world needs me to save it. Which is so ridiculous and egotistical.”

— Heidi Julavits

36. “When you are expending much energy on someone else’s demise, it’s like you weaken your psychic immune system.”

— Heidi Julavits

37. “I’m at that age where I notice friends checking out my face and wondering, Has she been Botoxed? There’s a new map there people that are trying to read. I think if I did get any kind of enhancement I would be very public about it. I don’t want people wondering – I want them to know.”

— Heidi Julavits

38. “I wanted to escape my head because my head is so stupid these days. I wanted to be inside someone else’s head.”

— Heidi Julavits

39. “Sometimes it can be useful to read your bad reviews.”

— Heidi Julavits

40. “Maybe the body is taking responsibility where the mind is not. It’s scrapbooking for us.”

— Heidi Julavits

41. “I wont deny that I have a far more productive writing life without the Internet, mostly because I rekindle my ability to concentrate on one thing for a period of longer than three minutes. My curiosity is channeled inward rather than Internet-ward.”

— Heidi Julavits

42. “I guess what I find so interesting about memory, and its role in a person’s identity, is how the attempt to achieve accuracy requires you to remove yourself from your life in an authorial manner.”

— Heidi Julavits

43. “I always think it’s useful to get an outside opinion.”

— Heidi Julavits

44. “A white girl disappears from a white prep school in a white suburb. Nobody knows what happened to her. The overall whiteness of the world is threatened. This must be resolved by whatever means possible.”

— Heidi Julavits

45. “I used to be as scared of public speaking as I was of sharks. Every time I teach I get an endorphin high off the fact that I did not have a panic attack. I teach and swim in order to measure my improvement as a human. I am no longer terrified of quite so many things.”

— Heidi Julavits

46. “If I’d done the discovery before I wrote the book, then there would be nothing to discover. It would feel dutiful instead of exciting.”

— Heidi Julavits

47. “There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they’ve thought it through beforehand. Whereas I’ll finish a first draft and I’m nowhere near done.”

— Heidi Julavits

48. “I reread books to measure my degree of difference from myself.”

— Heidi Julavits

49. “I obviously read and adore traditional fiction. I teach traditional fiction; I also teach all kinds of not-so-traditional fiction.”

— Heidi Julavits

50. “When I write, I am trying through the movement of my fingers to reach my head. I’m trying to build a word ladder up to my brain.”

— Heidi Julavits