Emily Gould quotes:

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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