Miriam Toews Quotes

Researching Magic Johnson, I realized I clearly haven't done enough with my life.

It is hard work to give life to new characters every single day. It is not as if I am God. I am just a tired, middle-aged woman trying to keep going.

He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his own nature... is less liable than anyone else to miss and waste life.

Some instinct - and I think it was a correct one - led me to do something difficult enough to give my life meaning.

I think that everyone at any age should ask themselves, 'where do I want to be today, where do I want to be tomorrow, and where do I want to be in a hundred years?' We all have clear answers to those questions. We only have so much time. It's a real shame if we don't spend our lives trying to do that.

So what do you desire to do? What do you really want to do as a person? You need to stop and document that; write it down; make a plan; and then God says, 'I'll direct your steps.'

What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.

If you're successful at a young age, no matter the profession, there has to come a time when you reevaluate everything, what it means to you. 'Is this what I want to do for the rest of my life?'

Each of us must become impassioned, finding meaning and self-fulfillment in our own life's journey.

We must have a theme, a goal, a purpose in our lives. If you don't know where you're aiming, you don't have a goal. My goal is to live my life in such a way that when I die, someone can say, she cared.

I have a more developed sense of my priorities. Life has so much more meaning now.

At the heart of the failure of most plays is the inability to carry on a thoughtful conversation about your work with yourself.

It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

The point of my explanation is I'm very subjective when it comes to describing my characters: they are all a little bit a part of me from the outside in or the inside out - but to put your mind at ease, I built Paul Snider from the outside in.

It's a matter of choosing what is most important to you and putting that first. Once you have recognized your true purpose in life, this becomes much easier.

To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life; fully experienced, it turns our eyes, attentive and alert, to a future possibly lived better than our past.

Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis. If you don't have the imposition of family to remind you of what is at stake, something else will.

You do have to continue, as you grow as a human, checking in and going, 'Is this what I want? Am I giving away things that I don't want? Who am I and what do I want to keep doing?'

I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.

If your focus in life is on being productive, when things are not happening... one has to ask oneself, 'Is this worth a grown man's time?'

Mortal experiences give us the opportunity to assess what we are doing with our lives.

I don't really sit there and think, 'What would I like my life to be?'

Create a ladder of values and priorities in your life, reminding yourself of what really matters to you.

It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that's something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.

I'm conscious to know who I am as a young man and what I want to be off the field and how I want to impact other people.