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Something Is Unfolding, Being Revealed To Me. I See That There's A Whole World Of Of Girls And Their Doings That Has Been Unknown To Me, And That I Can Be Part Of Without Making Any Effort At All. I Don't Have To Keep Up With Anyone, Run As Fast, Aim As Well, Make Loud Explosive Noises, Decode Messages, Die On Cue. I Don't Have To Think About Whether I Do These Things Well, As Well As A Boy. All I Have To Do Is Sit On The Floor And Cut Frying Pans Our Of The Eaton's Catalogue With Embroidery Scissors, And Say I've Done It Badly.

-Margaret Atwood

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Something Is Unfolding, Being

Margaret Atwood

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Something Is Unfolding, Being Revealed To Me. I See That There's A Whole World Of Of Girls And Their Doings That Has Been Unknown To Me, And That I Can Be Part Of Without Making Any Effort At All. I Don't Have To Keep Up With Anyone, Run As Fast, Aim As Well, Make Loud Explosive Noises, Decode Messages, Die On Cue. I Don't Have To Think About Whether I Do These Things Well, As Well As A Boy. All I Have To Do Is Sit On The Floor And Cut Frying Pans Our Of The Eaton's Catalogue With Embroidery Scissors, And Say I've Done It Badly.

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Don't Be Married To A Line Or Verse If It Can't Rhyme, Fit The Meter, Or Doesn't Fit The Outline.

At Moments Like This I Envy Those Who Have Found A Safe Haven In Which To Bestow Their Hearts; Or Perhaps I Envy Them For Having A Heart To Bestow. I Often Feel That I Myself Am Without One, And Possess In Its Stead Merely A Heart Shaped Stone.

I Could End This With A Moral, As If This Were A Fable About Animals, Though No Fables Are Really About Animals.

And Yes, I Know It's You; And That Is What We Will Come To, Sooner Or Later, When It's Even Darker Than It Is Now, When The Snow Is Colder, When It's Darkest And Coldest And Candles Are No Longer Any Use To Us And The Visibility Is Zero: Yes. It's Still You. It's Still You.

I Used To Act In College, But Always Comedy. Didn't Do [william] Shakespeare - Did Ben Jonson.

I Grew Up Amongst Biologists.

I Hate To Tell You This, But You Will Never Actually Go To A Galaxy Far, Far Away And Encounter Darth Vader. That's Science Fiction; It Isn't Going To Happen.

Life's Not Fair; Why Should I Be?

Roughing It Builds A Boy's Character, But Only Certain Kinds Of Roughing It.

As God Contains All Good Things, He Must Also Contain A Sense Of Playfulness -- A Gift He Has Shared With Creatures Other Than Ourselves, As Witness The Tricks Crows Play, And The Sportiveness Of Squirrels, And The Frolicking Of Kittens.

What Fabrications They Are, Mothers. Scarecrows, Wax Dolls For Us To Stick Pins Into, Crude Diagrams. We Deny Them An Existence Of Their Own, We Make Them Up To Suit Ourselves -- Our Own Hungers, Our Own Wishes, Our Own Deficiencies.

I'm A Fool, To Confuse This With Goodness. I Am Not Good. I Know Too Much To Be Good. I Know Myself. I Know Myself To Be Vengeful, Greedy, Secretive And Sly.

...and Nostalgia Swept Through Jimmy Like A Sudden Hunger.

The Interesting Thing About The Religious Component, For Me, Is That Jesus Hardly Mentions Sex At All. He's Pretty Interested In The Poor, He's Pretty Interested In Selling Your Worldly Goods And Storing Up Riches In Heaven. However, Religious Fundamentalists Have Made It All About Sex, And That's Like Saying, "look At The Sex And We're Just Not Going To Talk About What You May Be Doing In A Financial Way That Is Sinful."

Nature Is An Expert In Cost-benefit Analysis,' She Says. 'although She Does Her Accounting A Little Differently. As For Debts, She Always Collects In The Long Run.

Cost Benefit Analysis

Choice Of Evils Debates Always Produce Extremism - People Choose What They Hope Is The Lesser Evil, Then Call It Good And Demonize The Other Choice. It Will Be A Challenge For Your Generation To Synthesize - To Move Beyond Us Versus Them, To We.

Happy As A Clam, Is What My Mother Says For Happy. I Am Happy As A Clam: Hard-shelled, Firmly Closed.

I Think Of Bad News As A Huge Bird, With The Wings Of A Crow And The Face Of My Grade Four School Teacher, Sparse Bun, Rancid Teeth, Wrinkly Frown, Pursed Mouth And All, Sailing Around The World Under Cover Of Darkness Pleased To Be The Bearer Of Ill Tidings, Carrying A Basket Of Rotten Eggs, And Knowing- As The Sun Comes Up- Exactly Where To Drop Them. On Me, For One.

Love Is Giving, Marriage Is Buying And Selling. You Can't Put Love Into A Contract.

We Want To Get There Faster. Get Where? Wherever We Are Not. But A Human Soul Can Only Go As Fast As A Man Can Walk, They Used To Say. In That Case, Where Are All The Souls? Left Behind. They Wander Here And There, Slowly, Dim Lights Flickering In The Marshes At Night, Looking For Us. But They're Not Nearly Fast Enough, Not For Us, We're Way Ahead Of Them, They'll Never Catch Up. That's Why We Can Go So Fast: Our Souls Don't Weigh Us Down.

Where Do You Draw The Line, Between Love And Greed? We Never Did Know, We Always Wanted More. We Want To Take It All In, For One Last Time, We Want To Eat The World With Our Eyes.

The Internet Is 95 Percent Porn And Spam

Faith Is Only A Word, Embroidered.

And Sometimes It Happened, For A Time. That Kind Of Love Comes And Goes And Is Hard To Remember Afterwards, Like Pain. You Would Look At The Man One Day And You Would Think, I Loved You, And The Tense Would Be Past, And You Would Be Filled With A Sense Of Wonder, Because It Was Such An Amazing And Precarious And Dumb Thing To Have Done; And You Would Know Too Why Your Friends Have Been Evasive About It, At The Time.

Popular Art Is The Dream Of Society; It Does Not Examine Itself.

It's A Critical Fallacy Of Our Times ... That A Writer Should 'grow,' 'change,' Or 'develop.' This Fallacy Causes Us To Expect From Children Or Radishes: 'grow,' Or There's Something Wrong With You. But Writers Are Not Radishes. If You Look At What Most Writers Actually Do, It Resembles A Theme With Variations More Than It Does The Popular Notion Of Growth.

For Years I Wanted To Be Older, And Now I Am.

Because You May Think A Bed Is A Peaceful Thing, Sir, And To You It May Mean Rest And Comfort And A Good Night's Sleep. But It Isn't So For Everyone; And There Are Many Dangerous Things That May Take Place In A Bed.

Time Rises And Rises, And When It Reaches The Level Of Your Eyes You Drown.

I Myself Have 12 Hats And Each One Represents A Different Personality. Why Just Be Yourself.

Somebody Has Been A Complete Ratbag All Their Life And They've Gotten Away With It, And They Die Happy And Rich, We So Much Want To Believe That They're Going Off To The Halls Of Judgment, That Their Heart Will Be Weighed Against The Feather Of Truth, That It Will Be Heavy With Sin And It Will Be Eaten By A Crocodile. It's Almost Essential To Our Well-being To Have A Fallback Position Like That. It May Appear As If You've Gotten Away With It, But You'll Pay For It Later.

Knowing Was A Temptation. What You Don't Know Won't Tempt You.

We Yearned For The Future. How Did We Learn It, That Talent For Insatiability?

He Might Die For Her, But Living For Her Would Be Quite Different.

It Had Helped To Keep Her Sane, That Writing. Then, When Time Had Begun Again And Real People Had Entered It, She'd Abandoned It Here. Now It's A Whisper From The Past. Is That What Writing Amounts To? The Voice Your Ghost Would Have, If It Had A Voice?

I Began Writing At The Age Of 5, But There Was A Dark Period Between The Ages Of 8 And 16 When I Didn't Write. I Started Again At 16. And Have No Idea Why, But It Was Suddenly The Only Thing I Wanted To Do.

Things Written Down Can Cause A Great Deal Of Harm. All Too Often, People Don't Consider That.

I Don't Want To Look At Something That Determines Me So Completely.

But Remember That Forgiveness Too Is A Power. To Beg For It Is A Power, And To Withhold Or Bestow It Is A Power, Perhaps The Greatest. Maybe None Of This Is About Control. Maybe It Isn't Really About Who Can Own Whom, Who Can Do What To Whom And Get Away With It, Even As Far As Death. Maybe It Isn't About Who Can Sit And Who Has To Kneel Or Stand Or Lie Down, Legs Spread Open. Maybe It's About Who Can Do What To Whom And Be Forgiven For It. Never Tell Me It Amounts To The Same Thing.

You Can Think Clearly Only With Your Clothes On.

It's A Feature Of Our Age That If You Write A Work Of Fiction, Everyone Assumes That The People And Events In It Are Disguised Biography — But If You Write Your Biography, It's Equally Assumed You're Lying Your Head Off.

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How Old Do You Have To Get Before Wisdom Descends Like A Plastic Bag Over Your Head And You Learn To Keep Your Big Mouth Shut? Maybe Never. Maybe You Get More Frivolous With Age.

You Fit Into Me Like A Hook Into An Eye A Fish Hook An Open Eye

At The Very Least We Want A Witness. We Can't Stand The Idea Of Our Own Voices Falling Silent Finally, Like A Radio Running Down.

Anybody Who Writes A Book Is An Optimist. First Of All, They Think They're Going To Finish It. Second, They Think Somebody's Going To Publish It. Third, They Think Somebody's Going To Read It. Fourth, They Think Somebody's Going To Like It. How Optimistic Is That?

I'm Working On My Own Life Story. I Don't Mean I'm Putting It Together; No, I'm Taking It Apart.

Canadians Are Fond Of A Good Disaster, Especially If It Has Ice, Water, Or Snow In It. You Thought The National Flag Was About A Leaf, Didn't You? Look Harder. It's Where Someone Got Axed In The Snow.

As Charles Darwin Said,'the Economy Shown By Nature In Her Resources Is Striking,'' Says The Spirit. 'all Wealth Comes From Nature. Without It, There Wouldn't Be Any Economics. The Primary Wealth Is Food, Not Money. Therefore Anything That Concerns The Handling Of The Land Also Concerns Me.

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You Can Never Read Your Own Book With The Innocent Anticipation That Comes With That First Delicious Page Of A New Book, Because You Wrote The Thing. You've Been Backstage. You've Seen How The Rabbits Were Smuggled Into The Hat. Therefore Ask A Reading Friend Or Two To Look At It Before You Give It To Anyone In The Publishing Business. This Friend Should Not Be Someone With Whom You Have A romantic Relationship, Unless You Want To Break Up.

I Grew Up In The North Woods Of Canada. You Had To Know Certain Things About Survival. Wilderness Survival Courses Weren't Very Formalized When I Was Growing Up, But I Was Taught Certain Things About What To Do If I Got Lost In The Woods.

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For If The World Treats You Well, Sir, You Come To Believe You Are Deserving Of It.

God Gave Unto The Animals A Wisdom Past Our Power To See: Each Knows Innately How To Live, Which We Must Learn Laboriously.

A Paradox, The Doughnut Hole. Empty Space, Once, But Now They've Learned To Market Even That. A Minus Quantity; Nothing, Rendered Edible. I Wondered If They Might Be Used-metaphorically, Of Course-to Demonstrate The Existence Of God. Does Naming A Sphere Of Nothingness Transmute It Into Being?

Time Has Not Stood Still. It Has Washed Over Me, Washed Me Away, As If I'm Nothing More Than A Woman Of Sand, Left By A Careless Child Too Near The Water.

In The Animal World Individuals Cheat, As Do We.

Because I Am A Mother, I Am Capable Of Being Shocked: As I Never Was When I Was Not One.

The Young Habitually Mistake Lust For Love, They're Infested With Idealism Of All Kinds.

When You Are In The Middle Of A Story It Isn't A Story At All, But Only A Confusion; A Dark Roaring, A Blindness, A Wreckage Of Shattered Glass And Splintered Wood; Like A House In A Whirlwind, Or Else A Boat Crushed By The Icebergs Or Swept Over The Rapids, And All Aboard Powerless To Stop It. It's Only Afterwards That It Becomes Anything Like A Story At All. When You Are Telling It, To Yourself Or To Someone Else.

It Wasn't So Easy Though, Ending The War. A War Is A Huge Fire; The Ashes From It Drift Far, And Settle Slowly.

I Am Not A Saint Or A Cripple, I Am Not A Wound; Now I Will See Whether I Am A Coward.

Where Do The Words Go When We Have Said Them?

I Saw All Of The Films [based On The Tempest] Available, Including The One With Helen Mirren In Which Prospero Is Prospera - You Wonder, "would It Work?" But It Does, Because Anything She Does Works.

If You Want What's In The Package You Should At Least Know How To Get The String Off, Is What I Say.

Whatever Is Silenced Will Clamor To Be Heard, Though Silently.

I Spent Much Of My Childhood In Northern Quebec, And Often There Was No Radio, No Television - There Wasn't A Lot To Entertain Us. When It Rained, I Stayed Inside Reading, Writing, Drawing.

Here And There Are Worms, Evidence Of The Fertility Of The Soil, Caught By The Sun, Half Dead; Flexible And Pink, Like Lips.

He Considers Me Also A Little Fragile Because Artistic. I Need To Be Cared For, Like A Potted Plant.

You Don't Look Back Along Time But Down Through It, Like Water. Sometimes This Comes To The Surface, Sometimes That, Sometimes Nothing. Nothing Goes Away.

When I Am Writing Fiction, I Believe I Am Much Better Organized, More Methodical - One Has To Be When Writing A Novel. Writing Poetry Is A State Of Free Float.

Beginnings Are Sudden, But Also Insidious. They Creep Up On You Sideways, They Keep To The Shadows, They Lurk Unrecognized. Then, Later, They Spring.

If Social Stability Goes Pear-shaped, You Have A Choice Between Anarchy And Dictatorship. Most People Will Opt For More Security, Even If They Have To Give Up Some Personal Freedom.

You Can Only Be Jealous Of Someone Who Has Something You Think You Ought To Have Yourself.

But In The End, Back She Comes. There's No Use Resisting. She Goes To Him For Amnesia, For Oblivion. She Renders Herself Up, Is Blotted Out; Enters The Darkness Of Her Own Body, Forgets Her Name. Immolation Is What She Wants, However Briefly. To Exist Without Boundaries.

All Fiction Is About People, Unless It's About Rabbits Pretending To Be People. It's All Essentially Characters In Action, Which Means Characters Moving Through Time And Changes Taking Place, And That's What We Call 'the Plot'.

This Is The Solstice, The Still Point Of The Sun, Its Cusp And Midnight, The Year's Threshold And Unlocking, Where The Past Lets Go Of And Becomes The Future; The Place Of Caught Breath.

Kill What You Can't Save What You Can't Eat Throw Out What You Can't Throw Out Bury What You Can't Bury Give Away What You Can't Give Away You Must Carry With You, It Is Always Heavier Than You Thought.

Each Form Has Its Pluses And Its Minuses.

When You're Unhinged, Things Make Their Way Out Of You That Should Be Kept Inside, And Other Things Get In That Ought To Be Shut Out. The Locks Lose Their Powers. The Guards Go To Sleep. The Passwords Fail.

Toast Is Me. I Am Toast.

I Wish You Good Writing And Good Luck. Even If You've Already Done The Good Writing, You'll Still Need The Good Luck. It's A Shark-filled Lagoon Out There. Cross Your Fingers And Watch Your Back.

Don't Wait Until You're 'in The Mood.' Get Into The Mood By Writing.

We Have Begun To Slam Doors, And To Throw Things. I Throw My Purse, An Ashtray, A Package Of Chocolate Chips, Which Breaks On Impact. We Are Picking Up Chocolate Chips For Days. Jon Throws A Glass Of Milk, The Milk, Not The Glass: He Knows His Own Strength, As I Do Not. He Throws A Box Of Cheerios, Unopened. The Things I Throw Miss, Although They Are Worse Things. The Things He Throws Hit, But Are Harmless. I Begin To See How The Line Is Crossed, Between Histrionics And Murder.

You Can Pretty Much Trace When The Big Individual Indebtedness Kicked In, And It Was When The Credit Card Became Generally Available.

If All Fossil Fuel Were To Go Poof! Tomorrow, The Result Would Be A Cataclysmic Social Upheaval, With Food Riots, Warlords, Shutdowns, Breakdown Of Social Order, Water Shortages, And Outbreaks Of Bloodshed And Disease.

Writing Poetry Is A State Of Free Float.

I Hate To Break This To You: One Of These Days I'm Going To Die. I Expect That When I Croak I'll No Longer Be Using Twitter, Unless I Can Do It From The Grave.

If We Were All On Trial For Our Thoughts, We Would All Be Hanged.

Imagine A Famine. Now Imagine A Piece Of Bread. Both Of These Things Are Real But You Happen To Be In The Same Room With Only One Of Them. Put Yourself Into A Different Room, That’s What The Mind Is For.

As William Gibson Says, The Future Is Already Here But It's Lumpy. It's Unevenly Distributed. Some People Are Already Living This, The Ones On Low-lying Islands Off The Coast Of India Are Being Swept Away, You Know, It's Already Happening To Some People. We Happen To Be Very Lucky So Far.

If I Waited For Perfection... I Would Never Write A Word.

Nature Full Strength Is More Than We Can Take, Adam One Used To Say. It's A Potent Hallucinogen, A Soporific, For The Untrained Soul. We're No Longer At Home In It. We Need To Dilute It. We Can't Drink It Straight. And God Is The Same. Too Much God And You Overdose. God Needs To Be Filtered.

Storytelling Is A Very Old Human Skill That Gives Us An Evolutionary Advantage. If You Can Tell Young People How You Kill An Emu, Acted Out In Song Or Dance, Or That Uncle George Was Eaten By A Croc Over There, Don't Go There To Swim, Then Those Young People Don't Have To Find Out By Trial And Error.

Art Happens. It Happens When You Have The Craft And The Vocation And Are Waiting For Something Else, Something Extra, Or Maybe Not Waiting; In Any Case It Happens. It's The Extra Rabbit Coming Out Of The Hat, The One You Didn't Put There.

He Doesn't Know Which Is Worse, A Past He Can't Regain Or A Present That Will Destroy Him If He Looks At It Too Clearly. Then There's The Future. Sheer Vertigo.

There Are Some Women Who Seem To Be Born Without Fear, Just As There Are People Who Are Born Without The Ability To Feel Pain. The Painless Ones Go Around Putting Their Hands On Hot Stoves, Freezing Their Feet To The Point Of Gangrene, Scalding The Lining Of Their Throats With Boiling Coffee, Because There Is No Warning Anguish. Evolution Does Not Favour Them. So Too Perhaps With The Fearless Women, Because There Aren't Very Many Of Them Around. ... Providence Appears To Protect Such Women, Maybe Out Of Astonishment.

Science Is Not Something That Exists Apart From Human Beings. It's One Of The Things We Do As Human Beings, And We Always Have Done Science And Technology In Some Form.

Men And Women Are Not "equal" If "equal" Means "exactly The Same." Our Many Puzzlements And Indeed Unhappinesses Come From Trying To Figure Out What The Differences Really Mean, Or Should Mean, Or Should Not Mean.

Those Walls And Bars Are There For A Reason,” Said Crake. “not To Keep Us Out, But To Keep Them In. Mankind Needs Barriers In Both Cases.” “them?” “nature And God.” “i Thought You Didn’t Believe In God,” Said Jimmy. “i Don’t Believe In Nature Either,” Said Crake. “or Not With A Capital N.

A Ratio Of Failures Is Built Into The Process Of Writing. The Wastebasket Has Evolved For A Reason.

Menopause. A Pause While You Reconsider Men.

The Best Way Of Keeping A Secret Is To Pretend There Isn't One.

Keeping Secrets

Eating Is Our Earliest Metaphor, Preceding Our Consciousness Of Gender Difference, Race, Nationality, And Language. We Eat Before We Talk.

I Don't Think The Relationship Between Novels And Realities Are One To One. Of Course Novels Play Different Roles. It's Essentially Just A Long Narrative Form. What You Use That Long Narrative Form For Can Be Very Different.

Money As Such Is, As Oscar Wilde Said, Perfectly Useless. You Can't Eat It, Drink It, Shelter Yourself From The Cold With It, Wear It, Or Make Love With It Unless Deeply Disturbed. In And Of Itself, It Has No Emotions, No Mind, And No Conscience. It Doesn't Put Out Flowers Or Have Children, And It Makes A Lousy Pet. It Has Meaning Only When It Circulates, And Is Exchanged For Other Things; And Money Doesn't Do That For Itself. People Do That, Using Money As A Symbolic Token.

So This Was The Rest Of His Life. It Felt Like A Party To Which He'd Been Invited, But At An Address He Couldn't Actually Locate. Someone Must Be Having Fun At It, This Life Of His; Only, Right At The Moment, It Wasn't Him.

Younger People Have Greatest Fears. Why Is That? Because They Don't Know The Plot. They Don't Know Their Own Individual Plot... They Don't Know What's Going To Happen To Them.

I Would Not Change [my Past Work] Anymore Than I Would Airbrush A Photo Of Myself.

What A Lost Person Needs Is A Map Of The Territory, With His Own Position Marked On It So He Can See Where He Is In Relation To Everything Else.

Remember,' She'd Tell Her Staff, 'every Customer Wants To Feel Like A Princess, And Princesses Are Selfish And Overbearing.

Every Budding Dictatorship Begins By Muzzling The Artists, Because They're A Mouthy Lot And They Don't Line Up And Salute Very Easily.

The Story As Told In The Odyssey Doesn't Hold Water. There Are Too Many Inconsistencies.

Blondes Are Like White Mice, You Only Find Them In Cages. They Wouldn’t Last Long In Nature. They’re Too Conspicuous.

We Love Each Other, That’s True Whatever It Means, But We Aren’t Good At It; For Some It’s A Talent, For Others Only An Addiction.

The Problem With Meditating Is I Generally Go To Sleep, And That's Because I'm Doing It Wrong.

I Learned To Read Very Early So I Could Read The Comics, Which I Then Started To Draw.

No More Photos. Surely There Are Enough. No More Shadows Of Myself Thrown By Light Onto Pieces Of Paper, Onto Squares Of Plastic. No More Of My Eyes, Mouths, Noses, Moods, Bad Angles. No More Yawns, Teeth, Wrinkles. I Suffer From My Own Multiplicity. Two Or Three Images Would Have Been Enough, Or Four, Or Five. That Would Have Allowed For A Firm Idea: This Is She. As It Is, I'm Watery, I Ripple, From Moment To Moment I Dissolve Into My Other Selves. Turn The Page: You, Looking, Are Newly Confused. You Know Me Too Well To Know Me. Or Not Too Well: Too Much.

If I Were Going To Convert To Any Religion I Would Probably Choose Catholicism Because It At Least Has Female Saints And The Virgin Mary.

Jimmy Had Been Full Of Himself Back Then, Thinks Snowman With Indulgence And A Little Envy. He’d Been Unhappy Too, Of Course. It Went Without Saying, His Unhappiness. He’d Put A Lot Of Energy Into It.

It Was Like Being In An Elevator Cut Loose At The Top. Falling, Falling, And Not Knowing When You Will Hit.

If You Dj Reality, That Is, If You Make A Mash-up Of Actual Reality, You're Going To End Up With Something That Inevitably People Will Say, "this Is Feminist." Because You Cannot Avoid That.

Everyone Thinks Writers Must Know More About The Inside Of The Human Head, But That's Wrong. They Know Less, That's Why They Write. Trying To Find Out What Everyone Else Takes For Granted.

Foreignness Is All Around. Only In The Heart Of The Heart Of The Country, Namely The Heart Of The United States, Can You Avoid Such A Thing. In The Center Of An Empire, You Can Think Of Your Experience As Universal. Outside The Empire Or On The Fringes Of The Empire, You Cannot.

I'm Bad At Picking Heroes.

Their Mothers Had Finally Caught Up To Them And Been Proven Right. There Were Consequences After All But They Were The Consequences To Things You Didn't Even Know You'd Done.

I Would Like To Be The Air That Inhabits You For A Moment Only. I Would Like To Be That Unnoticed And That Necessary.

Karen Wasn't Hard, She Was Soft, Too Soft. A Soft Touch. Her Hair Was Soft, Her Smile Was Soft, Her Voice Was Soft. She Was So Soft There Was No Resistance. Hard Things Sank Into Her, They Went Right Through Her, And If She Made A Real Effort, Out The Other Side. Then She Didn't Have To See Them Or Hear Them, Or Even Touch Them.

Love's Never A Fair Trade.

A Man Is Just A Woman's Strategy For Making Other Women.

There's An Epigram Tacked To My Office Bulletin Board, Pinched From A Magazine -- "wanting To Meet An Author Because You Like His Work Is Like Wanting To Meet A Duck Because You Like Pâté.

I Did ... Learn An Important Distinction In Graduate School: A Speculation About Who Had Syphilis When Is Gossip If It's About Your Friends, A Plot Element If It's About A Character In A Novel, And Scholarship If It's About John Keats.

In Shakespeare Saved My Life, [author Laura Bates] Said She Got Better Papers From [prisoners] Than She Got From People In Her Regular Classes. Because She Was Teaching, Of Course, Macbeth, And A Number Of Them Had Murdered People. The Guy Who Wrote The Best Paper Said, "you Do Have This, 'is This A Dagger Which I See Before Me?' Before You Do It, But In My Case It Was A Gun."

When Women Let Their Hair Down, It Means Either Sexiness Or Craziness Or Death, The Three By Victorian Times Having Become Virtually Synonymous.

The Human Moral Keyboard Is Limited ... There's Nothing You Can Play On It That Hasn't Been Played Before. And, My Dear Friends, I Am Sorry To Say This, But It Has Its Lower Notes.

Better Not To Invent Her In Her Absence. Better To Wait Until She's Actually Here. Then He Can Make Her Up As She Goes Along.

I'm With The Spirit Of Earth-day-yet-to-come. Nobody Can Really Predict The Future, All You Can Do Is Look At Trends, And That Could Change At Any Moment.

The Body Is So Easily Damaged, So Easily Disposed Of, Water And Chemicals Is All It Is, Hardly More To It Than A Jellyfish Drying On Sand.

She Knows The Rituals, She Knows How We're Supposed To Be Behaving...but I Think These Things Are Impenetrable And Fraudulent, And I Can't Do Them Without Feeling I'm Acting.

I Always Thought Eating Was A Ridiculous Activity Anyway. I'd Get Out Of It Myself If I Could, Though You've Got To Do It To Stay Alive, They Tell Me.

She Who Pays The Undertaker Calls The Tune.

I Marvel Again At The Nakedness Of Men's Lives: The Showers Right Out In The Open, The Body Exposed For Inspection And Comparison, The Public Display Of Privates. What Is It For? What Purposes Of Reassurance Does It Serve? The Flashing Of A Badge, Look, Everyone, All Is In Order, I Belong Here. Why Don't Women Have To Prove To One Another That They Are Women? Some Form Of Unbuttoning, Some Split-crotch Routine, Just As Casual. A Doglike Sniffing.

Fear Has A Smell, As Love Does.

Powerlessness And Silence Go Together.

Creating Some God For One's Inspirations Was Always A Good Way To Avoid Accusations Of Pride Should The Scheme Succeed, As Well As The Blame If Did Not.

I Never Have [suffered Writer’s Block], Although I’ve Had Books That Didn’t Work Out. I Had To Stop Writing Them. I Just Abandoned Them. It Was Depressing, But It Wasn’t The End Of The World. When It Really Isn’t Working, And You’ve Been Bashing Yourself Against The Wall, It’s Kind Of A Relief. I Mean, Sometimes You Bash Yourself Against The Wall And You Get Through It. But Sometimes The Wall Is Just A Wall. There’s Nothing To Be Done But Go Somewhere Else.

We Are Very Short On Organs, And The Pig Solution Is Probably A Lot Better Than The Human Clone Solution - Though Maybe Not For The Pigs.

And She Finds It Difficult To Believe—that A Person Would Love Her Even When She Isn't Trying. Trying To Figure Out What Other People Need, Trying To Be Worthy.

There's Something Final About Saying You Were Married Once. It's Like Saying You Were Dead Once. It Shuts Them Up.

Science Is A Tool, And We Invent Tools To Do Things We Want. It's A Question Of How Those Tools Are Used By People.

Why Aren't We Investing More In Alternate Tech? The Saudi Arabians Are, Scottish Power Is. I Was Just There. Could It Be That We're Counting On The Oil Going On Forever And Ever And Ever And Us Having All Of It And Getting Very Rich?

When Any Civilization Is Dust And Ashes," He Said, "art Is All That's Left Over. Images, Words, Music. Imaginative Structures. Meaning—human Meaning, That Is—is Defined By Them. You Have To Admit That.

It Made Him Feel Invisible—not That He Wanted To Feel Anything Else.

All I Can Hope For Is A Reconstruction: The Way Love Feels Is Always Only Approximate.

Little Girls Are Cute And Small Only To Adults. To One Another They Are Not Cute. They Are Life-sized.

I Planned My Death Carefully, Unlike My Life, Which Meandered Along From One Thing To Another, Despite My Feeble Attempts To Control It.

Every Night When I Go To Bed I Think, In The Morning I Will Wake Up In My Own House And Things Will Be Back The Way They Were. It Hasn’t Happened This Morning, Either.

Vampires Get The Joy Of Flying Around And Living Forever, Werewolves Get The Joy Of Animal Spirits. But Zombies, They're Not Rich, Or Aristocratic, They Shuffle Around. They're A Group Phenomenon, They're Not Very Fast, They're Quite Sickly. So What's The Pleasure Of Being One?

I Am Nervous About Dogmas Of Any Kind, Whether They Be Religious, Political, Or Anti-religious. Too Many Heads Have Rolled Because Of Them.

Richard Liked To Say He Picked Things Up For A Song, Which Was Odd, Because He Never Sang. He Never Even Whistled. He Was Not A Musical Person.

I Particularly Like Twitter, Because It's Short And Can Be Very Funny And Informative. It's A Little Bit Like Having Your Own Radio Program.

Come Away With Me, He Said, We Will Live On A Desert Island. I Said, I Am A Desert Island. It Was Not What He Had In Mind.

Of Course (said Oryx), Having A Money Value Was No Substitute For Love. Every Child Should Have Love, Every Person Should Have It. . . . But Love Was Undependable, It Came And Then It Went, So It Was Good To Have A Money Value, Because Then At Least Those Who Wanted To Make A Profit From You Would Make Sure You Were Fed Enough And Not Damaged Too Much. Also There Were Many Who Had Neither Love Nor A Money Value, And Having One Of These Things Was Better Than Having Nothing.

Confronted By Too Much Emptiness ... The Brain Invents. Loneliness Creates Company As Thirst Creates Water. How Many Sailors Have Been Wrecked In Pursuit Of Islands That Were Merely A Shimmering?

Soon It Will Be Daybreak. Soon The Day Will Break. I Can't Stop It From Breaking In The Same Way It Always Does, And Then From Lying There Broken; Always The Same Day, Which Comes Around Again Like Clockwork. It Begins With The Day Before The Day Before, And Then The Day Before, And Then It's The Day Itself. A Saturday. The Breaking Day. The Day The Butcher Comes.

Once You Publish A Book, It Is Out Of Your Control. You Cannot Dictate How People Read It.

There Is No Fool Like An Educated Fool.

It Used To Be That Your Bloodlines Dictated Who You Were. But The U.s. Became The Land Of The Self-made Man, In Which Not Only Did You Make A Fortune But You Could Make Up Everything Else About Yourself As Well. You Move Into A New Town With A Spurious Pedigreed Background And You Just Make Yourself Up.

When They're Gone Out Of His Head, These Words, They'll Be Gone, Everywhere, Forever. As If They Had Never Been.

I'm A Strict, Strict Agnostic. It's Very Different From A Casual, 'i Don't Know.' It's That You Cannot Present As Knowledge Something That Is Not Knowledge. You Can Present It As Faith, You Can Present It As Belief, But You Can't Present It As Fact.

Where There's A Doctor It's Always A Bad Sign. Even When They Are Not Doing The Killing Themselves It Means A Death Is Close, And In That Way They Are Like Ravens Or Crows.

By Telling You Anything At All I'm At Least Believing In You, Believe You're There, I Believe You Into Being. Because I'm Telling You This Story I Will Your Existence. I Tell, Therefore You Are. So I Will Go On. So I Will Myself To Go On.

You Shouldn't Do That," Said Laura. "you Could Set Yourself On Fire.

A Handful Of Crumpled Stars

It's Rather Useless To Write A Gripping Narrative With Nothing In It But Climate Change Because Novels Are Always About People Even If They Purport To Be About Rabbits Or Robots.

The Scroll Is Coming Back (twitter Is A Scroll.)

The Threat To The Planet Is Us. It's Actually Not A Threat To The Planet - It's A Threat To Us.

If The National Mental Illness Of The United States Is Megalomania, That Of Canada Is Paranoid Schizophrenia.

Some Days I Do Appreciate Things More, Eggs, Flowers, But Then I Decide I'm Only Having An Attack Of Sentimentality, My Brain Going Pastel Technicolor, Like A Beautiful-sunset Greeting Cards They Used To Make So Many Of In California. High-gloss Hearts. The Danger Is Grayout.

I Hope That People Will Finally Come To Realize That There Is Only One 'race' - The Human Race - And That We Are All Members Of It.

More Powerful Than God, More Evil Than The Devil; The Poor Have It, The Rich Lack It, And If You Eat It You Die?

You Can Forget Who You Are If You're Alone Too Much.

Water Does Not Resist. Water Flows. When You Plunge Your Hand Into It, All You Feel Is A Caress. Water Is Not A Solid Wall, It Will Not Stop You. But Water Always Goes Where It Wants To Go, And Nothing In The End Can Stand Against It. Water Is Patient. Dripping Water Wears Away A Stone. Remember That, My Child. Remember You Are Half Water. If You Can't Go Through An Obstacle, Go Around It. Water Does.

But The Adjectives Change,” Said Jimmy. “nothing’s Worse Than Last Year’s Adjectives.

My Family Was Big On Sharing. I Guess It Was Just The Way I Was Brought Up. Or Maybe, I Read Those Fairy Tales In Which One Good Turn Elicits Another. But In Writing, Yes, Some Older Writers Were Kind To Me When I Was Young; Although Some Others Were Not.

As I Was Whizzing Around The United States On Yet Another Demented Book Tour, Getting Up At Four In The Morning To Catch Planes, Doing Two Cities A Day, Eating The Pringle Food Object Out Of The Mini-bar At Night As I Crawled Around On The Hotel Room Floor, Too Tired Even To Phone Room Service, I Thought, 'there Must Be A Better Way Of Doing This'.

The Cat Jumps Up On The Bed And Tries To Get Onto My Head. It's His Way Of Telling Whether Or Not I'm Dead. If I'm Not, He Wants To Be Scratched; If I Am - He'll Think Of Something

People Use Technology Only To Mean Digital Technology. Technology Is Actually Everything We Make.

The Reason They Invented Coffins, To Lock The Dead In, Preserve Them, They Put Makeup On Them; They Didn't Want Them Spreading Or Changing Into Anything Else. The Stone With The Name And Date Was On Them To Weight Them Down.

Literature Is Not Only A Mirror; It Is A Map, A Geography Of The Mind.

He Needed To Exist Only In The Present, Without Guilt, Without Expectation.

Science Fiction, To Me, Has Not Only Things That Wouldn't Happen, But Other Planets.

Science Fiction

I Think Every Age Lives In A Blend Of Technology So There's Always Older Ones Mixed In With Newer Ones, And When The New Technology Goes Down, The Immediate Fallback Position Is Either That Technology Just Before That Or One Several Technologies Back.

Sons Branch Out, But One Woman Leads To Another.

I Want, I Don’t Want. How Can One Live With Such A Heart?

Another Belief Of Mine; That Everyone Else My Age Is An Adult, Whereas I Am Merely In Disguise.

And Consider: It Is Loss To Which Everything Flows, Absence In Which Everything Flowers

The Past Is A Closed Door.

They Spent The First Three Years Of School Getting You To Pretend Stuff And Then The Rest Of It Marking You Down If You Did The Same Thing.

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