Emily Gould Quotes & Sayings

I think that genre distinctions basically boil down to marketing categories, which are outdated. Any time people have an argument about them, they're arguing about something that doesn't exist in any meaningful way that has to do with style or substance or actual content of books. — Emily Gould

Amy had always thought she was too vain and selfish to seriously contemplate suicide, also too afraid of pain. She realized now that when she'd thought that, she hadn't understood how painful existence could get. It could get so painful, it turned out, that any other kind of pain began to seem preferable. She felt ridiculous thinking these goth-teenager thoughts, but they were real. — Emily Gould

A lot of people get to the point in their careers where blurbs are ghostwritten for them, because they're like, "I want to support this person, it's good for my career," and so they get someone at the publishing house to do it, or they copy something from the press release. People write their own blurbs, absolutely, some huge percentage of the time. — Emily Gould

Women especially are trained to protect other people's feelings, and a lot of that involves not telling the truth even about the fundamental details of your own experiences and your own life. — Emily Gould

To some extent the shorter the writing assignment is, the harder it is to accomplish, and a blurb is 200 words max. Blurbs are meaningless, and actual people who are buying the books don't care about them at all. — Emily Gould

Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority. — Emily Gould

I can look back and recognize the things I've done and said that were wrong: unethical, gratuitously hurtful, golden-rule-breaking, et cetera. Sometimes the wrongness was even clear at the time, though not as clear as it is now. But I did these things because I felt the pull of a trajectory, a sense of experience piling up the way it does as you turn the pages of a novel. I would be lying if I said I was a different person now. I am the same person. I would do it all again. — Emily Gould

If a woman writes about herself, she's a narcissist. If a man does the
same, he's describing the human condition. But people seem to evaluate
your work based on how much they relate to it, so it's like, well, who's
the narcissist? — Emily Gould

I would love it if my book was considered chick-lit or a beach read. That would be great. People would buy my book. — Emily Gould

Elisa Albert in a nutshell: funny, self-aware, and genuinely fearless that she might be a lunatic, or a genius, or both. — Emily Gould

Maybe she had assumed that what she and Sam had was veering in a permanent direction because they were at an age when people got married. She thought suddenly of how often during their relationship they'd found themselves surrounded by other couples, functioning as a unit and finding that it was easier to do so. Because couples were what society wanted, what it was built for. But maybe they hadn't simply been moving toward anything, maybe they had simply been coasting on inertia. — Emily Gould

For her part, Amy Kev's Waffles with a passionate ferocity that she felt a little bit guilty about not being able to feel, most of the time, for humans. It probably helped that he was constantly doing cute shit and couldn't speak. — Emily Gould

Existential angst was far, far above her pay grade. — Emily Gould

Relax, Amy, I'm not gay. I just like Sleater-Kinney. It's possible to like them and be heterosexual. It's not like I invited you to go see Tegan and Sara. — Emily Gould

I think that people are generally really terrible at being ambassadors of their own work. — Emily Gould

When you write in the third person, you get to imagine other people's interiority. — Emily Gould

As a child I was a little bit disgusted and embarrassed to learn about the facts of life, and did not immediately connect the idea of "sex" to the feelings I got when I lay on the carpet on my stomach,idly humping a stuffed animal while watching Sesame Street. The realization that sex could be something to anticipate happily rather than to dread as another unpleasant grown-up duty came to me in a dream. Nothing overtly sexual even happened in this dream - it was a dream about lying in bed on a sunny afternoon with sun streaking the sheets, surrounded by warmth, feeling satisfied. It took life a long time for life to catch up with what this idealized version of sex could be like; it's still not like that every time, but when it is, I notice. — Emily Gould

I don't think being a lawyer is more or less valuable than being a writer. — Emily Gould

Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories. — Emily Gould

No one ever addresses the possibility that a writer might not like her book. — Emily Gould

She wondered if it counted as being good if you did the good thing for purely selfish reasons. Probably not, but who cared. What was important was what you did, not how you felt. — Emily Gould

No human walking the earth thinks of himself as a bullshitter. — Emily Gould