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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.

-Margaret Atwood

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What Else Can I

Margaret Atwood

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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.

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Science Never Makes Things That Do Not Have To Do With What We Feel, By Which I Mean What We Want And What We Fear.

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.

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 Answers You Get From Literature Depend On The Questions You Pose.

Ah Men, Why Do You Want All This Attention? I Can Write Poems For Myself, Make Love To A Doorknob If Absolutely Necessary. What Do You Have To Offer Me I Can't Find Otherwise Except Humiliation? Which I No Longer Need.

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

Reading And Writing, Like Everything Else, Improve With Practice. And, Of Course, If There Are No Young Readers And Writers, There Will Shortly Be No Older Ones. Literacy Will Be Dead, And Democracy - Which Many Believe Goes Hand In Hand With It - Will Be Dead As Well.

A Voice Is A Human Gift; It Should Be Cherished And Used, To Utter Fully Human Speech As Possible. Powerlessness And Silence Go Together.

When You're Young, You Think Everything You Do Is Disposable. You Move From Now To Now, Crumpling Time Up In Your Hands, Tossing It Away. You're Your Own Speeding Car. You Think You Can Get Rid Of Things, And People Too—leave Them Behind. You Don't Yet Know About The Habit They Have, Of Coming Back. Time In Dreams Is Frozen. You Can Never Get Away From Where You've Been.

We Shouldn't Have Been So Scornful; We Should Have Had Compassion. But Compassion Takes Work, And We Were Young.

I Have Never Had Any Problems With Editors Who Wanted Me To Change My Methods Or Point Of View. I Pay A Lot Of Attention To Editors, But In A Different Way. They Sometimes Catch Mistakes And Help With The Order Of Poems In A Book. I Do Not Underestimate Them! Indeed, I Have Been One Myself.

Oppression Involves A Failure Of The Imagination: The Failure To Imagine The Full Humanity Of Other Human Beings.

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.

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.

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

I Was Kidnapped By Literature At A Young Age And Never Wanted To Be Ransomed.

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.

There Would Be No Sherlock Holmes If It Were Not For Serial Publication.

His Mouth Is On Me, His Hands, I Can't Wait And He's Moving, Already, Love, It's Been So Long, I'm Alive In My Skin, Again, Arms Around Him, Falling And Water Softly Everywhere, Never-ending.

There Is No Fool Like An Educated Fool.

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.

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.

Laughter May Instruct But It May Also Conceal, Defending The Joker Against Anger And Retaliation: A Game Is Only A Game.

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

Keeping Secrets

She Wasn't Ready To Settle Down, She Told Her Friends. That Was One Way Of Putting It. Another Was Would Have Been That She Had Not Found Anyone To Settle Down With. There Had Been Several Men In Her Life, But They Hadn't Been Convincing. They'd Been Somewhat Like Her Table - Quickly Acquired, Brightened Up A Little, But Temporary. The Time For That Kind Of Thing Was Running Out, However. She Was Tired Of Renting.

Poetry Is Where The Language Is Renewed.

While He Writes, I Feel As If He Is Drawing Me; Or Not Drawing Me, Drawing On Me - Drawing On My Skin - Not With The Pencil He Is Using, But With An Old-fashioned Goose Pen, And Not With The Quill End But With The Feather End. As If Hundreds Of Butterflies Have Settled All Over My Face, And Are Softly Opening And Closing Their Wings.

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.

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

My Family Was Scientifically Inclined: My Brother Did Turn Into A Neurophysiologist, And I Almost Became A Scientist Myself. I Could Have Gone That Way.

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

But Thoughtless Ingratitude Is The Armour Of The Young; Without It, How Would They Ever Get Through Life? The Old Wish The Young Well, But They Wish Them Ill Also: They Would Like To Eat Them Up, And Absorb Their Vitality, And Remain Immortal Themselves. Without The Protection Of Surliness And Levity, All Children Would Be Crushed By The Past - The Past Of Others, Loaded On Their Shoulders. Selfishness Is Their Saving Grace.

There's Nothing Like Drawing A Thing To Make You Really See It.

But My Dreaming Self Refuses To Be Consoled. It Continues To Wander, Aimless, Homeless, Alone. It Cannot Be Convinced Of Its Safety By Any Evidence Drawn From My Waking Life.

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.

Fatigue Is Here, In My Body, In My Legs And Eyes. That Is What Gets You In The End. Faith Is Only A Word, Embroidered.

To Live In Prison Is To Live Without Mirrors. To Live Without Mirrors Is To Live Without The Self.

The Biggest Debt Is Always The Government Debt; It's Always Debt That Government Has Run Up On Your Behalf.

Canada Was Built On Dead Beavers.

In The Spring, At The End Of The Day, You Should Smell Like Dirt.

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

I Want Everything Back, The Way It Was. But There Is No Point To It, This Wanting.

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

You're Never Going To Kill Storytelling, Because It's Built Into The Human Plan. We Come With It.

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

Happiness Is A Garden Walled With Glass: There's No Way In Or Out.

The World Is Being Run By People My Age, Men My Age, With Falling-out Hair And Health Worries, And It Frightens Me. When The Leaders Were Older Than Me I Could Believe In Their Wisdom, I Could Believe They Had Transcended Rage And Malice And The Need To Be Loved. Now I Know Better. I Look At The Faces In Newspapers, In Magazines, And Wonder: What Greeds, What Furies Drive Them On?

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

A Fist Is More Than The Sum Of Its Fingers.

Mathematical Logic

In The Animal World Individuals Cheat, As Do We.

For Me The Experience Of Writing Is Really An Experience Of Losing Control.... I Think It's Very Much Like Dreaming Or Like Surfing. You Go Out There And Wait For A Wave, And When It Comes It Takes You Somewhere And You Don't Know Where It'll Go.

But Maybe, Underneath, She Loves Him Too Much. Maybe It's Her Excessive Love That Pushes Him Away.

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

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.

Short Forms Are Returning Online. Interactivity Is Coming Back; It Was Always There In Oral Storytelling. Each Form Has Its Pluses And Its Minuses.

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

Our Biggest Moral Debt Is To The Environment. Take-take-take, Nothing Given Back.

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

People Cry At Weddings For The Same Reason They Cry At Happy Endings: Because They So Desperately Want To Believe In Something They Know Is Not Credible.

We're Facing Growing Climate Change, More Floods, More Droughts, More Crisis On A Planetary Level, And The Systems We Put In Place In The Twentieth Century Are Just Not Going To Work. We've Run Out Of Stuff. Our Big Problems Are Going To Be Energy Supplies And Food Supplies. This Is Not A Right-left Issue. It's A People Issue, And It Cuts Across All Our Categories.

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.

Just As If You Do A Mash-up Of Reality From The Point Of View Of African Americans In This Country, You're Going To End Up With Something That Will Say, "this Is Black Lives Matter." It's Not That People Necessarily Have Started Out From That Premise. But If You're Looking At Reality, That Will Be The Result Because That Is Reality.

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

How Shrunk, How Dwindled, In Our Times Creation's Mighty Seed - For Man Has Broke The Fellowship With Murder, Lust, And Greed.

I Feel Like Cotton Candy: Sugar And Air. Squeeze Me And I’d Turn Into A Small Sickly Damp Wad Of Weeping Pinky-red.

Like Many Modern Poets, I Tend To Conceal Rhymes By Placing Them In The Middle Of Lines, And To Avoid Immediate Alliteration And Assonance In Favor Of Echoes Placed Later In The Poems.

Women Are Human Beings, And Human Beings Are A Very Mixed Lot. I've Always Been Against The Idea That Women Were Victorian Angels, That They Could Do No Wrong. I've Always Thought It Was Horseshit And Does Nobody Any Good. Remember, Lizzie Borden Got Off Largely Because The Cultural Agenda Had Convinced People That Women Were Morally Superior To Men, So Lizzie Borden Was "incapable" Of Taking The Ax And Giving Her Mother 40 Whacks.

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.

I Didn't Go To School For A Full Year Until I Was 12. In The Summer I Was A Wild Child In The Woods, With No Shoes, And In The Fall It Was Back To The City, Shoe Shops And School.

My Good Intentions Are Completely Lethal.

Good Intentions

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

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.

Walking Along Past The Store Windows, Into Which She Peers With Her Usual Eagerness, Her Usual Sense That Maybe, Today, She Will Discover Behind Them Something That Will Truly Be Worth Seeing, She Feels As If Her Feet Are Not On Cement At All But On Ice. The Blade Of The Skate Floats, She Knows, On A Thin Film Of Water, Which It Melts By Pressure And Which Freezes Behind It. This Is The Freedom Of The Present Tense, This Sliding Edge.

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.

If I Pick Up A Book With Vampires On The Cover, I Want There To Be Vampires. If I Pick Up A Book With Spaceships On The Cover, I Want Spaceships. If I See One With Dragons, I Want There To Be Dragons Inside The Book. Proper Labeling. Ethical Labeling.

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.

You Cannot Teach Somebody To Write A Masterpiece, But You Can Certainly Teach Them How To Improve Their Writing Skills. And You Can Teach Them That They Can Make Their Own Voices More Effective By Being Able To Communicate More Clearly And Forcefully. It Makes People Feel More Capable When They Can Write - For Instance To Make A Request - Of A Politician - And When They Are Able To Receive A Reply.

Communications Technology Changes Possibilities For Communication, But That Doesn't Mean It Changes The Inherited Structure Of The Brain. So You May Think That You're Addicted To Online Reading, But As Soon As It Isn't Available Anymore, Your Brain Will Pretty Immediately Adjust To Other Forms Of Reading. It's A Habit Like All Habits.

I'm A Red Tory. To Get A Fix On This Category, You Have To Go Back To The 19th Century. The Tories Were The Ones Who Believed That Those In Power Had A Responsibility To The Community, That Money Should Not Be The Measure Of All Things.

We Are A Society Dying, Said Aunt Lydia, Of Too Much Choice.

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.

I Was Warped Early By Ray Bradbury And Edgar Allan Poe. I Was Very Fond Of Franz Kafka.

I'm Bad At Picking Heroes.

I Sometimes Felt As If These Marks On My Body Were A Kind Of Code, Which Blossomed, Then Faded, Like Invisible Ink Held To A Candle. But If They Were A Code, Who Held The Key To It? I Was Sand, I Was Snow — Written On, Rewritten, Smoothed Over.

Glenn Used To Say The Reason You Can't Really Imagine Yourself Being Dead Was That As Soon As You Say, 'i'll Be Dead,' You've Said The Word I, And So You're Still Alive Inside The Sentence. And That's How People Got The Idea Of The Immortality Of The Soul - It Was A Consequence Of Grammar.

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.

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.

Friendship Was Always Contingent.

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

Time Is Not A Thing That Passes ... It's A Sea On Which You Float.

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.

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.

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

No One Knows What Cuases An Outer Landscape To Become An Inner One.

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

The Darkness Is Really Out There. It's Not Something That's In My Head, Just. It's In My Work Because It's In The World.

The Alcohol Smell Is On My Fingers, Cold And Remote, Piercing Like A Steel Pin Going In. It Smells Like White Enamel Basins. When I Look Up At The Stars In The Nighttime, Cold And White And Sharp, I Think They Must Smell Like That.

For Me The Novel Is A Social Vehicle, It Reflects Society.

Whatever The Scientists May Come Up With, Writers And Artists Will Continue To Portray Altered Mental States, Simply Because Few Aspects Of Our Nature Fascinate People So Much. The So-called Mad Person Will Always Represent A Possible Future For Every Member Of The Audience - Who Knows When Such A Malady May Strike?

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

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.

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

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

The Act Of Making A Photograph Is Less A Question Of What Is Being Looked At Than How.

Ten Days After The War Ended, My Sister Laura Drove A Car Off A Bridge.

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

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.

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

I Am Afraid Of Falling Into Hopeless Despair, Over My Wasted Life, And I Am Still Not Sure How It Happened.

I Tried To Visualize My Jealousy As A Yellowy-brown Cloud Boiling Around Inside Me, Then Going Out Through My Nose Like Smoke And Turning Into A Stone And Falling Down Into The Ground. That Did Work A Little. But In My Visualization A Plant Covered With Poison Berries Would Grow Out Of The Stone, Whether I Wanted It To Or Not.

The Past Is A Closed Door.

Don't Misunderstand Me. I Am Not Scoffing At Goodness, Which Is Far More Difficult To Explain Than Evil, And Far More Complicated. But Sometimes It's Hard To Put Up With.

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.

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

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

A Non-event ... Is Better To Write About Than An Event, Because With A Non-event You Can Make Up The Meaning Yourself, It Means Whatever You Say It Means.

I'm Not An Activist By Nature. I Am Suspicious Of Utopian Thinking And Equally Suspicious Of Its Alternate. I Would Prefer To Stay In The Writing Burrow And Play With My Imaginary Friends And Enemies. I Get Sucked Into These Things.

When They Came To Harvest My Corpse (open Your Mouth, Close Your Eyes) Cut My Body From The Rope, Surprise, Surprise: I Was Still Alive. Tough Luck, Folks, I Know The Law: You Can't Execute Me Twice For The Same Thing. How Nice. I Fell To The Clover, Breathed It In, And Bared My Teeth At Them In A Filthy Grin. You Can Imagine How That Went Over. Now I Only Need To Look Out At Them Through My Sky-blue Eyes. They See Their Own Ill Will Staring Then In The Forehead And Turn Tail Before, I Was Not A Witch. But Now I Am One.

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

His Father Was Self-made, But His Mother Was Constructed By Others, And Such Edifices Are Notoriously Fragile.

I Write As If I've Lived A Lot Of Things I Haven't Lived.

Anyway, Maybe There Weren't Any Solutions. Human Society, Corpses And Rubble. It Never Learned, It Made The Same Cretinous Mistakes Over And Over, Trading Short-term Gain For Long-term Pain.

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?

Hatred Would Have Been Easier. With Hatred, I Would Have Known What To Do. Hatred Is Clear, Metallic, One-handed, Unwavering; Unlike Love.

I No Longer Feel I'll Be Dead By Thirty; Now It's Sixty. I Suppose These Deadlines We Set For Ourselves Are Really A Way Of Saying We Appreciate Time, And Want To Use All Of It. I'm Still Writing, I'm Still Writing Poetry, I Still Can't Explain Why, And I'm Still Running Out Of Time.

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.

I Am Not Running For Mayor Yet. But If It Comes To Be True That People Cannot Voice An Opinion Unless They Have Been Elected, Then We Are No Longer In A Democracy.

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

Some Cleric Putting A Match To Her. /neither Of Them Looks Happy About It. /once Lit, She'll Burn Like A Book, /like A Book That Was Ever Finished, /like A Locked-up Library.

We Lived In The Gaps Between The Stories

Walking Was Not Fast Enough, So We Ran. Running Was Not Fast Enough, So We Galloped. Galloping Was Not Fast Enough, So We Sailed. Sailing Was Not Fast Enough, So We Rolled Merrily Along On Long Metal Tracks. Long Metal Tracks Were Not Fast Enough, So We Drove. Driving Was Not Fast Enough, So We Flew. Flying Isn't Fast Enough For Us. 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.

If Your Not Annoying Somebody, You're Not Alive.

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.

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.

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 That’s What Art Is, For The Artist,” Said Crake. “an Empty Drainpipe. An Amplifier. A Stab At Getting Laid.

Support Your Libraries... Or Else!

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

She Had No Images Of This Love. She Could Offer No Anecdotes. It Was A Belief Rather Than A Memory.

One Good Maxim To Keep In Mind, And I Can't Remember Who Said It, "you Meet The Same People On The Way Down That You Meet On The Way Up, But You're Going The Other Way."

There Is More Than One Kind Of Freedom," Said Aunt Lydia. "freedom To And Freedom From. In The Days Of Anarchy, It Was Freedom To. Now You Are Being Given Freedom From. Don't Underrate It.

I Am Not Your Justification For Existence.

Knowledge Is Power Only As Long As You Keep Your Mouth Shut.

It Isn't Chic For Women To Be Drunk. Men Drunks Are More Excusable, More Easily Absolved, But Why? It Must Be Thought They Have Better Reasons.

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.

Wars Happen Because The Ones Who Start Them Think They Can Win.

Toast Is Me. I Am Toast.

If It's A Story I'm Telling, Then I Have Control Over The Ending... But If It's A Story, Even In My Head, I Must Be Telling It To Someone. You Don't Tell A Story Only To Yourself. There's Always Someone Else. Even When There Is No One.

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.

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

... 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.

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.

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.

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.

I Would Rather Dance As A Ballerina, Though Faultily, Than As A Flawless Clown.

To Want Is To Have A Weakness.

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?

As All Historians Know, The Past Is A Great Darkness, And Filled With Echoes.

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.

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

But We Still Find The World Astounding, We Can't Get Enough Of It; Even As It Shrivels, Even As Its Many Lights Flicker And Are Extinguished (the Tigers, The Leopard Frogs, The Plunging Dolphin Flukes), Flicker And Are Extinguished, By Us, By Us, We Gaze And Gaze. 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.

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

Marshall Mcluhan Is Absolutely Right, We Are Always Looking In The Rear View Mirror.

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

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.

It's Clear, It's Fresh, Like A Mint Candy.

We Should Take A Lesson From The Irish Potato Famine: Monocultures Are Vulnerable. Monocultures Of Any Kind Are Very Vulnerable, Because One Change And You're Cooked. So We Should Be Diversifying, Wouldn't You Say?

The Only Way You Can Write The Truth Is To Assume That What You Set Down Will Never Be Read. Not By Any Other Person, And Not Even By Yourself At Some Later Date. Otherwise You Begin Excusing Yourself. You Must See The Writing As Emerging Like A Long Scroll Of Ink From The Index Finger Of Your Right Hand; You Must See Your Left Hand Erasing It.

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

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

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.

We Have Been Shark To One Another, But Also Lifeboat.

You're Sad Because You're Sad. It's Psychic. It's The Age. It's Chemical. Go See A Shrink Or Take A Pill, Or Hug Your Sadness Like An Eyeless Doll You Need To Sleep. Well, All Children Are Sad But Some Get Over It. Count Your Blessings. Better Than That, Buy A Hat. Buy A Coat Or A Pet. Take Up Dancing To Forget.

'1984' Is Not A Wonder Tale. Not Only Could It Happen, But It Has Happened, But Under Different Names.

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'.

There's The Story, Then There's The Real Story, Then There's The Story Of How The Story Came To Be Told. Then There's What You Leave Out Of The Story. Which Is Part Of The Story Too.

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.

The Moment Of Betrayal Is The Worst, The Moment When You Know Beyond Any Doubt That You've Been Betrayed: That Some Other Human Being Has Wished You That Much Evil

There's Something To Be Said For Hunger: At Least It Lets You Know You're Still Alive.

Don’t Sit Down In The Middle Of The Woods. If You’re Lost In The Plot Or Blocked, Retrace Your Steps To Where You Went Wrong. Then Take The Other Road. And/or Change The Person. Change The Tense. Change The Opening Page.

Debt Is Not Just A Money Thing. It's About Owing And Being Owed. Money Is Just One Thing You Can Exchange. You Can Exchange Good Deeds, You Can Exchange Revenge, You Can Exchange Murders.

What You Get Is No Longer What You See.

Life's Not Fair; Why Should I Be?

It's Only Afterwards That It Becomes Anything Like A Story At All. When You're Telling It, To Yourself Or To Someone Else.

Shattered Glass

The Truth, It Seems, Is Not Just What You Find When You Open A Door: It Is Itself A Door, Which The Poet Is Always On The Verge Of Going Through.

People Dressed In A Certain Kind Of Clothing Are Never Wrong. Also They Never Fart.

As We Know From The Study Of History, No New System Can Impose Itself Upon A Previous One Without Incorporating Many Of The Elements To Be Found In The Latter.

There Is Something Powerful In The Whispering Of Obscenities, About Those In Power. There's Something Delightful About It, Something Naughty, Secretive, Forbidden, Thrilling. It's Like A Spell, Of Sorts. It Deflates Them, Reduces Them To The Common Denominator Where They Can Be Dealt.

Never Pray For Justice, Because You Might Get Some.

I Wanted To Forget The Past, But It Refused To Forget Me; It Waited For Sleep, Then Cornered Me.

I Think The Book You Always Like Best Is The One You're About To Write.

I Did Not Know That 'poetess' Was An Insult, And That I Myself Would Some Day Be Called One. I Did Not Know That To Be Told I Had Transcended My Gender Would Be Considered A Compliment. I Didn't Know — Yet — That Black Was Compulsory. All Of That Was In The Future. When I Was Sixteen, It Was Simple. Poetry Existed; Therefore It Could Be Written; And Nobody Had Told Me — Yet — The Many, Many Reasons Why It Could Not Be Written By Me.

It Was Exciting To Work With Director Jennifer Baichwal, Who Made Manufactured Landscapes And Others, On The Film Of Payback: Debt And The Shadow Side Of Wealth. It's Called, Simply, Payback. Jennifer Didn't Want To Do A Transliteration Of The Book, A Kind Of Illustrated Version, But To Go Into The Core Of The Book: Owing And Being Owed, Paying And Paying Back, On All Sorts Of Levels. So She Found Real-life, Visceral Stories That Embodied The Themes Of The Book.

The Future Of Narrative? Built In, Part Of The Human Template. Not Going Away. The Future Of The Codex Book, With Pages And So Forth? A Platform For Transmitting Narratives.

Messy Love Is Better Than None, I Guess. I Am No Authority On Sane Living.

We Pulled The Seeds Out And Scattered Them On Their Flossy Parachutes, Leaving Only The Leathery Brownish Yellow Tongue, Soft As The Inside Of An Elbow.

If I Am Good Enough And Quiet Enough, Perhaps After All They Will Let Me Go; But It’s Not Easy Being Quiet And Good, It’s Like Hanging On To The Edge Of A Bridge When You’ve Already Fallen Over; You Don’t Seem To Be Moving, Just Dangling There, And Yet It Is Taking All Your Strength.

The Future Of Narrative? Built In, Part Of The Human Template. Not Going Away. The Future Of The Codex Book, With Pages And So Forth? A Platform For Transmitting Narratives. There Are Others. The Scroll Is Coming Back (twitter Is A Scroll.) Short Forms Are Returning Online. Interactivity Is Coming Back; It Was Always There In Oral Storytelling. Each Form Has Its Pluses And Its Minuses.

The Problem Is Huge. We've Just Added Seventy-five Million People To The Already Large Proportion Of People In The World Who Are Malnourished All The Time, Whose Bodies Are Being Starved.

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.

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