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Sometimes Reactions Can Be Quite Surprising: Readers Like Things That You, The Author, Feel You've Barely Gotten Away With; Or They Dislike One Of The Parts You Secretly Think Is One Of Your Little Gems.

-Margaret Atwood

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Sometimes Reactions Can Be

Margaret Atwood

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Sometimes Reactions Can Be Quite Surprising: Readers Like Things That You, The Author, Feel You've Barely Gotten Away With; Or They Dislike One Of The Parts You Secretly Think Is One Of Your Little Gems.

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The Thing About Delirium Is You Think It's Great, But It Actually Isn't.

If You Really Want To Stay The Same Age You Are Now Forever And Ever, She'd Be Thinking, Try Jumping Off The Roof: Death's A Sure-fire Method For Stopping Time.

Some Bioengineering Is Good, Especially If It Results In Plants That Are More Drought-resistant Or Perennial Food Crops.

Why Are You So Interested In Amoebas?" "oh, They're Immortal," He Said, "and Sort Of Shapeless And Flexible. Being A Person Is Getting Too Complicated.

I Myself Discovered Many Authors Through School Reading Lists And Through School Anthologies. The Positives Are: Young Readers Can Find The World Opening Up To Them Through Books They Study. The Negatives May Include Bad Experiences Kids Have - If They Don't Like The Book Or The Teacher, Or The Way The Book Is Taught.

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

When I Was 16, I Started Publishing All Kinds Of Things In School Magazines.

But Some People Can't Tell Where It Hurts. They Can't Calm Down. They Can't Ever Stop Howling.

Religions In General Have To Rediscover Their Roots. In Hinduism And The Koran, Animals Are Described As Equals. If You Walk Into A Cathedral And Look At The Decorations Of Early Christianity, There Are Vines, Animals, Creatures And Birds Thriving All Over The Stonework.

Which Of Us Can Resist The Temptation Of Being Thought Indispensable?

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.

Today On The Way Home, It Snows. Big, Soft Caressing Flakes Fall Onto Our Skin Like Cold Moths; The Air Fills With Feathers.

If I Love You, Is That A Fact Or A Weapon?

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

Reading ... Changes You. You Aren't The Same Person After You've Read A Particular Book As You Were Before, And You Will Read The Next Book, Unless Both Are Harlequin Romances, In A Slightly Different Way.

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.

Your Hand Is A Warm Stone I Hold Between Two Words.

... Remember That Forgiveness Too Is A Power. To Beg For It Is A Power, And To Withold Or Bestow It Is A Power, Perhaps The Greatest.

What Am I Living For And What Am I Dying For Are The Same Question.

I've Never Bought Into Any Sort Of Hard And Fast, This-box/that-box Characterization. People Are Individuals. Yes, They May Be Expected To Be A Particular Way. But That Doesn't Mean They're Going To Be That Way.

I'm Not An Activist By Nature. I Am Suspicious Of Utopian Thinking And Equally Suspicious Of Its Alternate.

One And One And One And One Doesn't Equal Four. Each One Remains Unique, There Is No Way Of Joining Them Together. They Cannot Be Exchanged, One For The Other. They Cannot Replace Each Other.

Before The Civil War, Canada Was At The Top Of The Underground Railroad. If You Made It Into Canada, You Were Safe Unless Someone Came And Hauled You Back. That Was Also True During The Vietnam War For Draft Resisters.

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

So Crake Never Remembered His Dreams. It's Snowman That Remembers Them Instead. Worse Than Remembers: He's Immersed In Them, He'd Wading Through Them, He's Stuck In Them. Every Moment He's Lived In The Past Few Months Was Dreamed First By Crake. No Wonder Crake Screamed So Much.

It's Evening, One Of Those Gray Water-color Washes, Like Liquid Dust.

Remember That, My Child. Remember You Are Half Water. If You Can't Go Through An Obstacle, Go Around It. Water Does.

We All Know That A Book Is Not Really A Person. It Isn’t A Human Being. But If You Are A Lover Of Books As Books – As Objects, That Is – And Ignore The Human Element In Them – That Is, Their Voices – You Will Be Committing An Error Of The Soul, Because You Will Be An Idolator, Or Else A Fetishist.

For An Instant She Felt Them, Their Identities, Almost Their Substance, Pass Over Her Head Like A Wave. At Some Time She Would Be — Or No, Already She Was Like That Too; She Was One Of Them, Her Body The Same, Identical, Merged With That Other Flesh That Choked The Air In The Flowered Room With Its Sweet Organic Scent; She Felt Suffocated By This Thick Sargasso-sea Of Femininity.

Vanity Is Becoming A Nuisance, I Can See Why Women Give It Up, Eventually. But I'm Not Ready For That Yet.

Each Form Has Its Pluses And Its Minuses.

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.

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.

You Can't Keep A Cool Head When You're Drowning In Love. You Just Trash Around A Lot And Scream, And Wear Yourself Out.

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.

Maybe That's What Love Is, I Thought: It's Being Pissed Off.

I Lie On The Floor, Washed By Nothing And Hanging On. I Cry At Night. I Am Afraid Of Hearing Voices, Or A Voice. I Have Come To The Edge, Of The Land. I Could Get Pushed Over.

Either I'm Alive Or I'm Dying, She Said To Daniel. Please Don't Feel You Can't Tell Me. Which Is It? Which Does It Feel Like? Said Daniel. He Patted Her Hand. You're Not Dead Yet. You're A Lot More Alive Than Many People. This Isn't Good Enough For Rennie. She Wants Something Definite, The Real Truth, One Way Or The Other. Then She Will Know What She Should Do Next. It's This Suspension, Hanging In A Void, This Half-life She Can't Bear. She Can't Bear Not Knowing. She Doesn't Want To Know.

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?

Where Do The Words Go When We Have Said Them?

I See That There Will Be No End To Imperfection, Or To Doing Things The Wrong Way. Even If You Grow Up, No Matter How Hard You Scrub, Whatever You Do, There Will Always Be Some Other Stain Or Spot On Your Face Or Stupid Act, Somebody Frowning.

Thy Only Authentic Ending Is The One Provided Here: John And Mary Die, John And Mary Die, John And Mary Die.

I Have Always Known That There Were Spellbinding Evil Parts For Women. For One Thing, I Was Taken At An Early Age To See Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. Never Mind The Protestant Work Ethic Of The Dwarfs. Never Mind The Tedious Housework-is-virtuous Motif. Never Mind The Fact That Snow White Is A Vampire -- Anyone Who Lies In A Glass Coffin Without Decaying And Then Comes To Life Again Must Be. The Truth Is That I Was Paralysed By The Scene In Which The Evil Queen Drinks The Magic Potion And Changes Her Shape. What Power, What Untold Possibilities!

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.

Being Edited Is Like Falling Face Down Into A Threshing Machine.

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.

Can I Be Blamed For Wanting A Real Body, To Put My Arms Around? Without It I Too Am Disembodied. I Can Listen To My Own Heartbeat Against The Bedsprings...but There’s Something Dead About It, Something Deserted.

When People In My Generation Started To Write, We Did Not Actually Have Much Of A Movie Industry, Much Of A Theater Scene, Much Of A Television Industry Or Other Creative Outlets. But We Had A Lot Of Aspiring Writers. All That Has Changed. We Now Have A Movie Industry, Television Industry And Lots Of Theater. But We Have Retained A Large Contingent Of Writers And A Dedicated Readership. The Larger Number Of People In Society Who Value Writing, The Larger Number Of Good Writers Will Be Produced. That's My Belief. It Raises The Bar.

It's True That There Is A Rescue Thing In People, And Not Just Rescuing The Family, Which Is Kind Of Obvious From A Biological Point Of View. But Why Is It That Some People Will Jump Into A Freezing River And Swim Out To A Downed Plane For Total Strangers? What Is That About? And It Seems To Be That It's Part Of Your Concept Of Who You Are. That's Why Some People Run Into The Burning Buildings, Because If They Don't, Their Concept Of Who They Are Will Be Violated. They Wouldn't Be Who They Thought They Were.

We Lived In The Gaps Between The Stories

Though As He'd Say, What Is 'belief' But A Willingness To Suspend The Negatives?

They Seemed To Be Able To Choose. We Seemed To Be Able To Choose, Then. We Were A Society Dying Of Too Much Choice.

As Soon As You Have A Language That Has A Past Tense And A Future Tense You're Going To Say, 'where Did We Come From, What Happens Next?' The Ability To Remember The Past Helps Us Plan The Future.

A Fist Is More Than The Sum Of Its Fingers.

Mathematical Logic

Never Pray For Justice, Because You Might Get Some.

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

Snowman Wakes Before Dawn.

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.

Men Are Not To Be Told Anything They Might Find Too Painful; The Secret Depths Of Human Nature, The Sordid Physicalities, Might Overwhelm Or Damage Them. For Instance, Men Often Faint At The Sight Of Their Own Blood, To Which They Are Not Accustomed. For This Reason You Should Never Stand Behind One In The Line At The Red Cross Donor Clinic.

I Stand On The Corner, Pretending I Am A Tree.

Good Writing Takes Place At Intersections, At What You Might Call Knots, At Places Where The Society Is Snarled Or Knotted Up.

A Lot Of Being A Poet Consists Of Willed Ignorance. If You Woke Up From Your Trance And Realized The Nature Of The Life-threatening And Dignity-destroying Precipice You Were Walking Along, You Would Switch Into Actuarial Sciences Immediately.

You Can Examine The Whole 19th Century From The Point Of View Of Who Would Have Maxed Out Their Credit Cards. Emma Bovary Would Have Maxed Hers Out. No Question. Mr. Scrooge Would Not Have. He Would Have Snipped His Up.

Writers Are Much Better Behaved Nowadays, For A Couple Of Reasons. Once Upon A Time Nobody Was Thinking Of A Career, Unless You Lived In New York, So There Wasn't As Much Pressure To Present A Respectable Exterior. And Secondly, There Was No Social Media. So If You Were Found Face Down On The Floor - People Did Do That Quite A Bit; Usually Men, But Not Always - Or Fell Through Plate Glass Windows Or Got Into Scrapes, It Became A Rumor, And Rumors Are Hard To Pin Down.

Canada Was Built On Dead Beavers.

There Are Some Virtues To Not Saying What You Think All The Time.

Speculative Fiction Encompasses That Which We Could Actually Do. Sci-fi Is That Which We're Probably Not Going To See.

Speculative Fiction

I Tried For The Longest Time To Find Out What Deconstructionism Was. Nobody Was Able To Explain It To Me Clearly. The Best Answer I Got Was From A Writer, Who Said, 'honey, It's Bad News For You And Me.

This Is How The Girl Who Couldn't Speak And The Man Who Couldn't See Fell In Love.

He Has Been Trying To Sing Love Into Existence Again And He Has Failed

I Began To Forget Myself In The Middle Of Sentences.

We Still Think Of A Powerful Man As A Born Leader And A Powerful Woman As An Anomaly.

You Refuse To Own Yourself, You Permit Others To Do It For You

The Reader Cannot See Into Your Heart. He Will Know Only What You Tell Him. Make The Blind See Your Words. Make The Hard-hearted Feel. Make The Deaf Hear.

More Of Your Brain Is Involved When Reading Than It Is When You Watch Television... Because You Are Supplying Just About Everything... You're A Creator.

So Much For Endings. Beginnings Are Always More Fun. True Connoisseurs, However, Are Known To Favor The Stretch In Between, Since It's The Hardest To Do Anything With. That's About All That Can Be Said For Plots, Which Anyway Are Just One Thing After Another, A What And A What And A What.

The One Good Thing To Be Said About Announcing Yourself As A Writer In The Colonial Canadian Fifties Is That Nobody Told Me I Couldn't Do It Because I Was A Girl. They Simply Found The Entire Proposition Ridiculous. Writers Were Dead And English, Or Else Extremely Elderly And American; They Were Not Sixteen Years Old And Canadian.

My Parents Were Gardeners Themselves, And Perforce They Used Environmental Techniques Because It Was During The War, And You Didn't Have The New Sorts Of Chemicals.

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.

I Know That Some Books And Some Writers, You Can Pretty Much Draw A Square Around It And Say, 'nobody Under 40,' Or 'nobody Under 25.' With My Books, It Always Has Been, And Continues To Be, Spread Right Across The Board, And I Think The Operative Term Is 'reader.'

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.

I'm From The Generation That Had The Boys' Door And The Girls' Door When You Went To School, And You Got In Big Trouble If You Went In The Wrong One.

The Newspaper Stories Were Like Dreams To Us, Bad Dreams Dreamt By Others. How Awful, We Would Say, And They Were, But They Were Awful Without Being Believable. They Were Too Melodramatic, They Had A Dimension That Was Not The Dimension Of Our Lives. We Were The People Who Were Not In The Papers. We Lived In The Blank White Spaces At The Edges Of Print. It Gave Us More Freedom. We Lived In The Gaps Between The Stories.

He Stops, Looks Up At This Window, And I Can See The White Oblong Of His Face. We Look At Each Other. I Have No Rose To Toss, He Has No Lute. But It's The Same Kind Of Hunger.

When Things Are Really Dismal, You Can Laugh, Or You Can Cave In Completely.

Sometimes Reactions Can Be Quite Surprising: Readers Like Things That You, The Author, Feel You've Barely Gotten Away With; Or They Dislike One Of The Parts You Secretly Think Is One Of Your Little Gems.

I Don't Think Of Poetry As A 'rational' Activity But As An Aural One. My Poems Usually Begin With Words Or Phrases Which Appeal More Because Of Their Sound Than Their Meaning, And The Movement And Phrasing Of A Poem Are Very Important To Me.

I Am Not My Childhood,' Snowman Says Out Loud.

Old Lovers Go The Way Of Old Photographs, Bleaching Out Gradually As In A Slow Bath Of Acid: First The Moles And Pimples, Then The Shadings. Then The Faces Themselves, Until Nothing Remains But The General Outlines.

Farewells Can Be Shattering, But Returns Are Surely Worse. Solid Flesh Can Never Live Up To The Bright Shadow Cast By Its Absence.

Like The Trains, She's Never On Time And Always Departing.

Every Novel Is-at The Beginning-the Same Opening Of A Door Onto A Completely Unknown Space.

... All This Talking, This Rather Liquid Confessing, Was Something I Didn't Think I Could Ever Bring Myself To Do. It Seemed Foolhardy To Me, Like An Uncooked Egg Deciding To To Come Out Of Its Shell: There Would Be A Risk Of Spreading Out Too Far, Turning Into A Formless Puddle.

So Much Better To Travel Than To Arrive.

All Writers Must Go From Now To Once A Upon A Time; All Must Go From Here To There; All Must Descend To Where The Stories Are Kept; All Must Take Care Not To Be Captured And Held Immobile By The Past.

You Meet The Same People On The Way Down That You Meet On The Way Up, But You're Going The Other Way.

I Want To Be Held And Told My Name. I Want To Be Valued, In Ways That I Am Not; I Want To Be More Than Valuable. I Repeat My Former Name; Remind Myself Of What I Once Could Do, How Others Saw Me. I Want To Steal Something.

It Isn't Running Away They're Afraid Of. We Wouldn't Get Far. It's Those Other Escapes, The Ones You Can Open In Yourself, Given A Cutting Edge.

I’m Not Used To Girls, Or Familiar With Their Customs. I Feel Awkward Around Them, I Don’t Know What To Say. I Know The Unspoken Rules Of Boys, But With Girls I Sense That I Am Always On The Verge Of Some Unforeseen, Calamitous Blunder.

Your Friend Is Intellectually Honourable," Jimmy's Mother Would Say. "he Doesn't Lie To Himself.

The Object Is Very Clear In The Fight Against Racism; You Have Reasons Why You're Opposed To It. But When You're Writing A Novel, You Don't Want The Reader To Come Out Of It Voting Yes Or No To Some Question. Life Is More Complicated Than That.

What Else Can I Do? Once You've Gone This Far You Aren't Fit For Anything Else. Something Happens To Your Mind. You're Overqualified, Overspecialized, And Everybody Knows It. Nobody In Any Other Game Would Be Crazy Enough To Hire Me. I Wouldn't Even Make A Good Ditch-digger, I'd Start Tearing Apart The Sewer-system, Trying To Pick-axe And Unearth All Those Chthonic Symbols - Pipes, Valves, Cloacal Conduits... No, No. I'll Have To Be A Slave In The Paper-mines For All Time.

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

The Society In 'the Handmaid's Tale' Is A Throwback To The Early Puritans Whom I Studied Extensively At Harvard Under Perry Miller, To Whom The Book Is Dedicated.

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.

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.

How Easy It Is To Invent A Humanity, For Anyone At All.

Nevertheless, Blood Is Thicker Than Water, As Anyone Knows Who Has Tasted Both.

Starlet Sex Scandal. Giant Squid Involved.

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.

Time In Dreams Is Frozen. You Can Never Get Away From Where You've Been.

There Were No Men In This Painting, But It Was About Men, The Kind Who Caused Women To Fall. I Did Not Ascribe Any Intentions To These Men. They Were Like The Weather, They Didn't Have A Mind. They Merely Drenched You Or Struck You Like Lightning And Moved On, Mindless As Blizzards. Or They Were Like Rocks, A Line Of Sharp Slippery Rocks With Jagged Edges. You Could Walk With Care Along Between The Rocks, Picking Your Steps, And If You Slipped You'd Fall And Cut Yourself, But It Was No Use Blaming The Rocks.

Human Reason Is A Pin Dancing On The Head Of An Angel, So Small Is It In Comparison To The Divine Vastness That Encircles Us.

Why Are We Designed To See The World As Supremely Beautiful Just As We're About To Be Snuffed? Do Rabbits Feel The Same As The Fox Teeth Bite Down On Their Necks? Is It Mercy?

Some Of The Old Diseases That We Think Are Gone - Case In Point, Measles - Are Back, Now That Somebody Has Spread Around, In A Very Wicked Way, The Idea That These Inoculations Were Making Children Autistic. Now We're Getting Outbreaks That Are Killing Children. The End Result Is, If You Create A Population That Lacks Immunity, And Diseases Are Still There, You're Going To Get Outbreaks And You're Going To Get Death.

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.

Myths Can't Be Translated As They Did In Their Ancient Soil. We Can Only Find Our Own Meaning In Our Own Time.

Under The Old System - Which Is Now So Archaic That A Lot Of People Can't Remember It - If You Wanted Money You Had To Go To The Bank And Take The Money Out In Cash Form, And You Couldn't Take Out Money That You Didn't Have. But With The Credit Card You Can Spend Money You Don't Have, And That Is Just So Tempting.

Oil Paints...the Look Of Licked Lips.

Things Musicals Taught Me: All Your Problems Will Go Away If You Sing About It.

I Tell, Therefore You Are.

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.

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.

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.

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

Every Habit He's Ever Had Is Still There In His Body, Lying Dormant Like Flowers In The Desert. Given The Right Conditions, All His Old Addictions Would Burst Into Full And Luxuriant Bloom.

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.

No Male Writer Is Likely To Be Asked To Sit On A Panel Addressing Itself To The Special Problems Of A Male Writer.

Our Heaven Is Their Hell, Said God. I Like A Balanced Universe.

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.

I Grew Up In The Golden Age Of Flash Gordon And Sci-fi.

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

You Say, The Sensed Absence Of God And The Sensed Presence Amount To Much The Same Thing, Only In Reverse.

Lose Your Temper And You Lose The Fight.

I Wait. I Compose Myself. My Self Is A Thing I Must Now Compose, As One Composes A Speech. What I Must Present Is A Made Thing, Not Something Born.

Short Forms Are Returning Online. Interactivity Is Coming Back; It Was Always There In Oral Storytelling.

It Doesn't Really Matter What "genre" Your Book Is. What Matters Is That It's A Good Book Of Its Kind. Whatever That Kind May Be.

Making Final Judgements About Poets, Cities Or Regions On The Basis Of An Anthology Is Always Dangerous: Anthologies Are Mirages Created, Finally, By Their Editors.

What I Need Is Perspective. The Illusion Of Depth, Created By A Frame, The Arrangement Of Shapes On A Flat Surface. Perspective Is Necessary. Otherwise There Are Only Two Dimensions. Otherwise You Live With Your Face Squashed Up Against A Wall, Everything A Huge Foreground, Of Details, Close-ups, Hairs, The Weave Of The Bedsheet, The Molecules Of The Face. Your Own Skin Like A Map, A Diagram Of Futility, Criscrossed With Tiny Roads That Lead Nowhere. Otherwise You Live In The Moment. Which Is Not Where I Want To Be.

Was This A Betrayal, Or Was It An Act Of Courage? Perhaps Both. Neither One Involves Forethought: Such Things Take Place In An Instant, In An Eyeblink. This Can Only Be Because They Have Been Rehearsed By Us Already, Over And Over, In Silence And Darkness; In Such Silence, Such Darkness, That We Are Ignorant Of Them Ourselves. Blind But Sure-footed, We Step Forward As If Into A Remembered Dance.

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.

Extreme Good, Extreme Evil: The Abilities Required Are Similar.

The Only Way You Can Write The Truth Is To Assume That What You Set Down Will Never Be Read.

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

War Is What Happens When Language Fails.

All Stories Are About Wolves. All Worth Repeating, That Is. Anything Else Is Sentimental Drivel.

I'm Working On My Own Life Story. I Don't Mean I'm Putting It Together; No, I'm Taking It Apart. If You'd Wanted The Narrative Line You Should Have Asked Earlier, When I Still Knew Everything And Was More Than Willing To Tell. That Was Before I Discovered The Virtues Of Scissors, The Virtues Of Matches.

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.

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

Without The Light, No Chance; Without The Dark, No Dance.

Happiness Is A Garden Walled With Glass: There's No Way In Or Out. In Paradise There Are No Stories, Because There Are No Journeys. It's Loss And Regret And Misery And Yearning That Drive The Story Forward, Along Its Twisted Road.

Too Much God And You Overdose. God Needs To Be Filtered.

You're Dead, Cordelia.' No I'm Not. 'yes You Are. You're Dead. Lie Down.

Some Of Our Earliest Writing, In Cuneiform, Was About Who Owes What.

She Had Her Reasons. Not That They Were The Same As Anybody Else's Reasons.

A Handful Of Crumpled Stars

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.

What Is The Real Breath Of A Man — The Breathing Out Or The Breathing In?

I Was Once A Graduate Student In Victorian Literature, And I Believe As The Victorian Novelists Did, That A Novel Isn't Simply A Vehicle For Private Expression, But That It Also Exists For Social Examination. I Firmly Believe This.

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.

In The Early Fight For Women's Rights, The Point Was Not That Women Were Morally Superior Or Better. The Conversation Was About The Difference Between Men And Women - Power, Privilege, Voting Rights, Etc. Unfortunately, It Quickly Moved To The "women Are Better" Argument. If This Were True In Life Or In Fiction, We Wouldn't Have Any Dark Or Deep Characters. We Wouldn't Have Any Salomes, Carmens, Ophelias. We Wouldn't Have Any Jealousy Or Passion.

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.

Most Mothers Worry When Their Daughters Reach Adolescence But I Was The Opposite. I Relaxed, I Sighed With Relief. Little Girls Are Cute And Small Only To Adults. To One Another They Are Not Cute. They Are Life Sized.

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.

The True Story Is Vicious And Multiple And Untrue After All. Why Do You Need It? Don’t Ever Ask For The True Story.

Love's Never A Fair Trade.

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

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.

Don't Let The Bastards Grind You Down.

They Will Not Let You Have Peace, They Don't Want You To Have Anything They Don't Have Themselves.

Does Feminist Mean Large Unpleasant Person Who'll Shout At You Or Someone Who Believes Women Are Human Beings. To Me It's The Latter, So I Sign Up

I Became A Poet At The Age Of Sixteen. I Did Not Intend To Do It. It Was Not My Fault.

In The End, We'll All Become Stories.

Americans Don't Usually Have To Think About Canadian-american Relations, Or, As They Would Put It, American-canadian Relations. Why Think About Something Which You Believe Affects You So Little? We, On The Other Hand, Have To Think About You Whether We Like It Or Not.

The Cemetery Has ... An Inscription: 'though I Walk Through The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death I Will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' Yes, It Does Feel Deceptively Safer With Two; But Thou Is A Slippery Character. Every Thou I've Known Has Had A Way Of Going Missing.

Now I Can See How That Can Happen. You Can Fall In Love With Anybody--a Fool, A Criminal, A Nothing. There Are No Good Rules.

Falling In Love

Men Are Afraid That Women Will Laugh At Them. Women Are Afraid That Men Will Kill Them.

For The Children With Their Greedy Little Mouths Represent The Future, Which Like Time Itself Will Devour All Now Alive.

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.

Perhaps They Were Looking For Passion; Perhaps They Delved Into This Book As Into A Mysterious Parcel - A Gift Box At The Bottom Of Which, Hidden In Layers Of Rustling Tissue Paper, Lay Something They'd Always Longed For But Couldn't Ever Grasp.

I Don't Think I Solve Problems In My Poetry; I Think I Uncover The Problems.

Romance Takes Place In The Middle Distance. Romance Is Looking In At Yourself Through A Window Clouded With Dew. Romance Means Leaving Things Out: Where Life Grunts And Shuffles, Romance Only Sighs.

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

In Theory I Can Do Almost Anything; Certainly I Have Been Told How. In Practice I Do As Little As Possible. I Pretend To Myself That I Would Be Quite Happy In A Hermit's Cave, Living On Gruel, If Someone Else Would Make The Gruel. Gruel, Like So Many Other Things, Is Beyond Me.

It's Very Hard For Students Not To Be In Debt Unless They've Got Big Scholarships Or Rich Parents. And It's Called Investing In Your Future, But Like Any Investment It's Risky Because Your Future Is An Unknown Quantity. However, If You Don't Invest In Your Future, You May Be Flipping Hamburgers For The Rest Of Your Life. So It's A Real Dilemma.

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.

Better Never Means Better For Everyone... It Always Means Worse, For Some.

Every Utopia - Let's Just Stick With The Literary Ones - Faces The Same Problem: What Do You Do With The People Who Don't Fit In?

Extinctathon, Monitored By Maddaddam. Adam Named The Living Animals, Maddaddam Names The Dead Ones. Do You Want To Play?

My Brother And I Were Both Teenage Writers, And He Was, I Have To Say, Better Than I Was, But He Went Into Science, And I Went Into Writing.

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.

Everybody Acts As If They Have Free Will. They Act As If They Can Make These Decisions; Do They Know They Don't? I Think There's Been Some Back-down On The Idea That Everything Is Determined.

Publishing A Book Is Like Stuffing A Note Into A Bottle And Hurling It Into The Sea.

Please Don't Make The Mistake Of Thinking That 'oryx And Crake' Is Anti-science. Science Is A Way Of Knowing, And A Tool. Like All Ways Of Knowing And Tools, It Can Be Turned To Bad Uses. And It Can Be Bought And Sold, And It Often Is. But It Is Not In Itself Bad. Like Electricity, It's Neutral.

Within One's Own Family, Money Is Not The Measure Of Things, Unless The Person Is An Absolute Scrooge. Only The Most Extreme Kind Of Monster Would Put A Price On Everything.

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.

Forgiving Men Is So Much Easier Than Forgiving Women.

God Is Not The Voice In The Whirlwind, God Is The Whirlwind.

You Always Think, 'oh, If Only I Had A Little Chalet In The Mountains! How Great That Would Be And I'd Do All This Writing' Except, No, I Wouldn't. I'd Do The Same Amount Of Writing I Do Now And The Rest Of The Time I'd Go Stir Crazy. If You're Waiting For The Perfect Moment You'll Never Write A Thing Because It Will Never Arrive. I Have No Routine. I Have No Foolproof Anything. There's Nothing Foolproof.

Time Is Not A Line But A Dimension, Like The Dimensions Of Space. If You Can Bend Space You Can Bend Time Also, And If You Knew Enough And Could Move Faster Than Light You Could Travel Backwards In Time And Exist In Two Places At Once.

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