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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?

-Margaret Atwood

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Whatever The Scientists May

Margaret Atwood

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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?

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The Fact Is That Blank Pages Inspire Me With Terror. What Will I Put On Them? Will It Be Good Enough? Will I Have To Throw It Out?

...we Must Be A Beacon Of Hope, Because If You Tell People There's Nothing They Can Do, They Will Do Worse Than Nothing.

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.

But Most Hearts Say, I Want, I Want, I Want, I Want. My Heart Is More Duplicitous, Though No Twin As I Once Thought. It Says, I Want, I Don't Want, I Want, And Then A Pause. It Forces Me To Listen.

I'll Make You Mine, Lovers Said In Old Books. They Never Said, I'll Make You Me.

You Can Wet The Rim Of A Glass And Run Your Finger Around The Rim And It Will Make A Sound. This Is What I Feel Like: This Sound Of Glass. I Feel Like The Word Shatter. I Want To Be With Someone.

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.

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

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

You Can’t Buy It, But It Has A Price,” Said Oryx. “everything Has A Price.

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

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

No Mother Is Ever, Completely, A Child's Idea Of What A Mother Should Be, And I Suppose It Works The Other Way Around As Well. But Despite Everything, We Didn't Do Too Badly By One Another, We Did As Well As Most.

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.

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 Trickle-down Theory Of Economics Has It That It's Good For Rich People To Get Even Richer Because Some Of Their Wealth Will Trickle Own, Through Their No Doubt Lavish Spending, Upon Those Who Stand Below Them On The Economic Ladder. Notice That The Metaphor Is Not That Of A Gushing Waterfall But Of A Leaking Tap: Even The Most Optimistic Endorsers Of This Concept Do Not Picture Very Much Real Flow, As Their Language Reveals" Pg. 102.

If It's All Instruction, You Get Annoyed With It And Bored, And You Stop Reading. If It's All Entertainment, You Read It Quite Quickly, Your Heart Going Pitty-pat, Pitty-pat. But When You Finish, That's It. You're Not Going To Think About It Much Afterward, Apart From The Odd Nightmare. You're Not Going To Read That Book Again.

In The Evenings There's Been Thunder, A Distant Bumping And Stumbling, Like God On A Sullen Binge.

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.

My Brother And I Were Both Good At Science, And We Were Both Good At English Literature. Either One Of Us Could Have Gone Either Way.

Mary Baker Eddy Is Said To Have Had A Phone Installed In Her Coffin Just In Case She Happened To Wake Up. I've Been Told That's An Urban Myth. Somebody Should Check It Out.

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

You Think I'm Not A Goddess? Try Me. This Is A Torch Song. Touch Me And You'll Burn.

Then Sail, My Fine Lady, On The Billowing Wave - The Water Below Is As Dark As The Grave, And Maybe You'll Sink In Your Little Blue Boat - It's Hope, And Hope Only, That Keeps Us Afloat

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Plague Has Hung Over Human History. The Biggest Human Extinction Was After 1492 In North And South America When The Mortality Rate Was 95 Per Cent, Which Is Enormous. But Again, I'm Actually Giving You Grounds For Optimism: There Were Enough To Continue. The Five Per Cent Who Made It Through Are What You Need To Survive A Bottleneck, Which We Have Been Through Before.

Sooner Or Later, I Hate To Break It To You, You're Gonna Die, So How Do You Fill In The Space Between Here And There? It's Yours. Seize Your Space.

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.

We Slept In What Had Once Been The Gymnasium.

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

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."

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.

Her Glass Wings Are Gone.

Why Does The Mind Do Such Things? Turn On Us, Rend Us, Dig The Claws In. If You Get Hungry Enough, They Say, You Start Eating Your Own Heart. Maybe It's Much The Same.

Nobody Dies From Lack Of Sex. It's Lack Of Love We Die From.

A Rat In A Maze Is Free To Go Anywhere, As Long As It Stays Inside The Maze.

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.

I Read A Piece By A Guy Out In Alberta That Said Canadians Are Lazy Because They're Not Patenting Enough New Inventions. I Disagree. Canadians Invent A Lot Of Stuff. Actually Patenting Them Is Expensive.

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."

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.

In View Of The Fading Animals The Proliferation Of Sewers And Fears The Sea Clogging, The Air Nearing Extinction We Should Be Kind, We Should Take Warning, We Should Forgive Each Other Instead We Are Opposite, We Touch As Though Attacking, The Gifts We Bring Even In Good Faith Maybe Warp In Our Hands To Implements, To Manoeuvres

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.

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.

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

It's A Lifelong Failing: She Has Never Been Prepared. But How Can You Have A Sense Of Wonder If You're Prepared For Everything? Prepared For The Sunset. Prepared For The Moonrise. Prepared For The Ice Storm. What A Flat Existence That Would Be.

Nature Is To Zoos As God Is To Churches.

She Knows Herself To Be At The Mercy Of Events, And She Knows By Now That Events Have No Mercy.

Ignoring Isn’t The Same As Ignorance, You Have To Work At It.

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

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.

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.

I've Been Involved In Activities With Other People Who Were Put In Jail. We Were Protesting The Closing Of The Prison Farm Program At The Prison I Used In A Previous Book, Alias Grace. Some Of Us Also Put Up Money In Order To Save The Heirloom Herd Of Cows There. So I Own Half A Cow!

Without The Protection Of Surliness And Levity, All Children Would Be Crushed By The Past—the Past Of Others, Loaded Onto Their Shoulders. Selfishness Is Their Saving Grace.

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.

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.

Why Is It We Want So Badly To Memorialize Ourselves? Even While We're Still Alive. We Wish To Assert Our Existence, Like Dogs Peeing On Fire Hydrants. We Put On Display Our Framed Photographs, Our Parchment Diplomas, Our Silver-plated Cups; We Monogram Our Linen, We Carve Our Names On Trees, We Scrawl Them On Washroom Walls. It's All The Same Impulse. What Do We Hope From It? Applause, Envy, Respect? Or Simply Attention, Of Any Kind We Can Get? 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.

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.

Fiction Is Not Necessarily About What You Know, It's About How You Feel. That Is The Truth About Fiction, And The Other Truth Is That All Science Is A Tool, And We Use Our Tools Not To Actualise What We Know, But To Implement How We Feel.

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

I Have Periods Now, Like Normal Girls; I Too Am Among The Knowing, I Too Can Sit Out Volleyball Games And Go To The Nurse's For Aspirin And Waddle Along The Halls With A Pad Like A Flattened Rabbit Tail Wadded Between My Legs, Sopping With Liver-colored Blood.

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.

Plato Said That Poets Should Be Excluded From The Ideal Republic Because They Are Such Liars. I Am A Poet, And I Affirm That This Is True. About No Subject Are Poets Tempted To Lie So Much As About Their Own Lives; I Know One Of Them Who Has Floated At Least Five Versions Of His Autobiography, None Of Them True. I Of Course - Being Also A Novelist - Am A Much More Truthful Person Than That. But Since Poets Lie, How Can You Believe Me?

I Tend To Feel If People Say They're Going To Do Something, They Will, If Given The Chance.

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

Why Is It We Want So Badly To Memorialize Ourselves? Even While We're Still Alive. We Wish To Assert Our Existence, Like Dogs Peeing On Fire Hydrants.

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

Our Problem Right Now Is That We're So Specialized That If The Lights Go Out, There Are A Huge Number Of People Who Are Not Going To Know What To Do. But Within Every Dystopia There's A Little Utopia.

Writing... Is An Act Of Faith: I Believe It's Also An Act Of Hope, The Hope That Things Can Get Better Than They Are.

But I Keep Going On With This Sad And Hungry And Sordid, This Limping And Mutilated Story, Because After All I Want You To Hear It, As I Will Hear Yours Too If I Ever Get The Chance, If I Meet You Or If You Escape, In The Future Or In Heaven Or In Prison Or Underground, Some Other Place. What They Have In Common Is That They're Not Here. By Telling You Anything At All I'm At Least Believing In You, I 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.

The Goals Of The Feminist Movement Have Not Been Achieved, And Those Who Claim We're Living In A Post-feminist Era Are Either Sadly Mistaken Or Tired Of Thinking About The Whole Subject.

Madness Is Only An Amplification Of What You Already Are.

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

More And More I Feel Like A Letter—deposited Here, Collected There. But A Letter Addressed To No One.

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.

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

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.

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

The Future Of Narrative? Built In, Part Of The Human Template. Not Going Away.

I Did Not Know How To Paint Or Even What To Paint, But I Knew I Had To Begin.

Sons Branch Out, But One Woman Leads To Another.

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

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

A Reader Can Never Tell If It's A Real Thimble Or An Imaginary Thimble, Because By The Time You're Reading It, They're The Same. It's A Thimble. It's In The Book.

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.

A Home Filled With Nothing But Yourself. It's Heavy, That Lightness. It's Crushing, That Emptiness.

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 Was Unfair To Him, Of Course, But Where Would I Have Been Without Unfairness? In Thrall, In Harness. Young Women Need Unfairness, It's One Of Their Few Defenses. They Need Their Callousness, They Need Their Ignorance. They Walk In The Dark, Along The Edges Of High Cliffs, Humming To Themselves, Thinking Themselves Invulnerable.

A Suicide Is Both A Rebuke To The Living And A Puzzle That Defies Them To Solve It. Like A Poem, Suicide Is Finished And Refuses To Answer Questions As To Its Final Cause.

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

Speculative Fiction

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.

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

In The End, We'll All Become Stories.

I Suppose These Deadlines We Set For Ourselves Are Really A Way Of Saying We Appreciate Time, And Want To Use All Of It.

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

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.

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

Teaching Other People To Write Is Not Something I Can Do. The Only Kind Of Advice I Can Give Them Will Be Trite By Its Nature. Of Course, Read A Lot, Write A Lot. The Kind Of Advice I Wish I Had Been Given Is All Of A Practical Nature, Having To Do With Publishers And Agents.

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

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.

These Things You Did Were Like Prayers; You Did Them And You Hoped They Would Save You. And For The Most Part They Did. Or Something Did; You Could Tell By The Fact That You Were Still Alive.

It Is Better To Hope Than To Mope!

Poetry Isn't Written From The Idea Down. It's Written From The Phrase, Line And Stanza Up, Which Is Different From What Your Teacher Taught You To Do In School.

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 Understand More Than We Know.

As With All Knowledge, Once You Knew It, You Couldn't Imagine How It Was That You Hadn't Known It Before.

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.

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.

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.

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

Gardening Is Not A Rational Act.

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.

I Have A Fork And A Spoon, But Never A Knife… As If I’m Lacking Manual Skills Or Teeth. I Have Both, However. That’s Why I’m Not Allowed A Knife.

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.

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

The Weapons That Were Once Outside Sharpening Themselves On War Are Now Indoors There, In The Fortress, Fragile In Glass Cases; Why Is It (i'm Thinking Of The Careful Moulding Round The Stonework Archways) That In This Time, Such Elaborate Defences Keep Things That Are No Longer (much) Worth Defending?

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.

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.

I Felt White, Drained Of Blood, Cared For, Purified. Peaceful.

The Heart Of Jesus Glowed, Because It Was Holy. Holy Things Glowed In General.

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

Reading Is One Of The Most Individual Things That Happens. So Every Reader Is Going To Read A Piece In A Slightly Different Way, Sometimes A Radically Different Way.

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'.

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

There Is No Fool Like An Educated Fool.

When We Think Of The Past It's The Beautiful Things We Pick Out. We Want To Believe It Was All Like That.

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.

You Will Always Have Partial Points Of View, And You'll Always Have The Story Behind The Story That Hasn't Come Out Yet. And Any Form Of Journalism You're Involved With Is Going To Be Up Against A Biased Viewpoint And Partial Knowledge.

You Aren't Sick & Unhappy Only Alive & Stuck With It.

The Beginning Of Canadian Cultural Nationalism Was Not 'am I Really That Oppressed?' But 'am I Really That Boring?'

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.

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.

An Eye For An Eye Only Leads To More Blindness.

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

I Walk Away From Him. It's Enormously Pleasing To Me, This Walking Away. It's Like Being Able To Make People Appear And Vanish, At Will.

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.

Lose Your Temper And You Lose The Fight.

When Faced With The Inevitable, You Always Have A Choice... As I Learned During My Liberal Arts Education, Any Symbol Can Have, In The Imaginative Context, Two Versions, A Positive And A Negative... If You Spill Your Milk You're Left With A Glass Which Is Either Half Empty Or Half Full... You May Not Be Able To Alter Reality, But You Can Alter Your Attitude Towards It, And This, Paradoxically, Alters Reality. Try It And See.

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

Pink Is Supposed To Weaken Your Enemies, Make Them Go Soft On You, Which Must Be Why It's Used For Baby Girls. It's A Wonder The Military Hasn't Got On To This.

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.

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.

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

If You Disagree With Your Government, That's Political. If You Disagree With Your Government That Is Approaching Theocracy, Then You're Evil.

Science And Fiction Both Begin With Similar Questions: What If? Why? How Does It All Work? But They Focus On Different Areas Of Life On Earth.

Paper Isn’t Important. It’s The Words On Them That Are Important.

Instead I Will Say, "take Me To Your Trees. Take Me To Your Breakfasts, Your Sunsets, Your Bad Dreams, Your Shoes, Your Nouns. Take Me To Your Fingers; Take Me To Your Deaths." These Are Worth It. These Are What I Have Come For.

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

No Matter How Much You've Been Warned, Death Always Comes Without Knocking. Why Now? Is The Cry. Why So Soon? It's The Cry Of A Child Being Called Home At Dusk.

Perhaps I Write For No One. Perhaps For The Same Person Children Are Writing For When They Scrawl Their Names In The Snow.

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.

I Don't Know Why They Are All So Eager To Be Remembered. What Good Will It Do Them? There Are Some Things That Should Be Forgotten By Everyone, And Never Spoken Of Again.

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.

It Was Very Interesting To Me That When Louisiana Was Destroyed In That Flood The Fundamentalists Were Very Quick To Say, It's The Punishment Of God On A Sinful City. Now That The Oil Industry Has Been So Hard Hit In Galveston, Are They Up On Their Pulpits Saying, God Is Punishing The Oil Industry? No, No, No!

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

Water Does Not Resist. Water Flows. When You Plunge Your Hand Into It, All You Feel Is A Caress.

I Never Say I'm An "ist" Of Any Kind Unless I Know How The Other Person Is Defining It.

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

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.

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

Books Are Frozen Voices, In The Same Way That Musical Scores Are Frozen Music. The Score Is A Way Of Transmitting The Music To Someone Who Can Play It, Releasing It Into The Air Where It Can Once More Be Heard. And The Black Alphabet Marks On The Page Represent Words That Were Once Spoken, If Only In The Writer's Head. They Lie There Inert Until A Reader Comes Along And Transforms The Letters Into Living Sounds. The Reader Is The Musician Of The Book: Each Reader May Read The Same Text, Just As Each Violinist Plays The Same Piece, But Each Interpretation Is Different.

About No Subject Are Poets Tempted To Lie So Much As About Their Own Lives.

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.

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

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

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

How Easy It Is, Treachery. You Just Slide Into It.

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.

Optimism Means Better Than Reality; Pessimism Means Worse Than Reality. I'm A Realist.

A Wave Of Blood Goes Up To My Head, My Stomach Shrinks Together, As If Something Dangerous Has Just Missed Hitting Me. It's As If I've Been Caught Stealing, Or Telling A Lie; Or As If I've Heard Other People Talking About Me, Saying Bad Things About Me, Behind My Back. There's The Same Flush Of Shame, Of Guilt And Terror, And Of Cold Disgust With Myself. But I Don't Know Where These Feelings Have Come From, What I've Done.

I Was Born In The Ottawa General Hospital Right After The Gray Cup Football Game In 1939. Six Months Later, I Was Backpacked Into The Quebec Bush. I Grew Up In And Out Of The Bush, In And Out Of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie And Toronto.

The Myth That Everyone Once Read Great Literature Is Just A Myth.

Great Literature

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

Why Is It He Feels Some Line Has Been Crossed, Some Boundary Transgressed? How Much Is Too Much, How Far Is Too Far?

The Newspaper Journalists Like To Believe The Worst; They Can Sell More Papers That Way, As One Of Them Told Me Himself; For Even Upstanding And Respectable People Dearly Love To Read Ill Of Others.

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.

All You Have To Do, I Tell Myself, Is Keep Your Mouth Shut And Look Stupid. It Shouldn't Be That Hard.

Although From You I Far Must Roam, Do Not Be Broken Hearted. We Two, Who In The Souls Are One, Are Never Truly Parted.

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

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.

I'm Not Sure I Really Am A Humanist. I Describe Myself As A Rigorous Agnostic, Which Means That You Cannot Declare As A Matter Of Material Truth Something That Is In Fact A Matter Of Spiritual Belief.

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.

Victorian Literature Was My Subject At Harvard.

Everybody Was Going Along Thinking That It Was A Day Like Any Other Day, And Bang, Down Went The Twin Towers. Changed Everything. So You Can't Really Predict The Future, But You Can Say, "boy, Are Those Glaciers Ever Melting." You Can Measure That, And You Can Say, "when They're All Melted There Won't Be Any Athabasca River," And You Can Say, "what Will Happen To The Oil Sands Then?" Because You Need A Lot Of Water To Make That Oil. "where's That Going To Come From?" You Can Say Things Like That.

... 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.

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

Writing Poetry Is A State Of Free Float.

I Think Calling It Climate Change Is Rather Limiting. I Would Rather Call It The Everything Change.

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.

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.

Well. Then We Had The Irises, Rising Beautiful And Cool On Their Tall Stalks, Like Blown Glass, Like Pastel Water Momentarily Frozen In A Splash, Light Blue, Light Mauve, And The Darker Ones, Velvet And Purple, Black Cat's Ears In The Sun, Indigo Shadow, And The Bleeding Hearts, So Female In Shape It Was A Surprise They'd Not Long Since Been Rooted Out. There Is Something Subversive About This Garden Of Serena's, A Sense Of Buried Things Bursting Upwards, Wordlessly, Into The Light, As If To Point, To Say: Whatever Is Silenced Will Clamor To Be Heard, Though Silently.

I'm The Only Person You've Ever Met Who Has Read Longfellow.

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.

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.

Canada Is A Balloon-puncturing Country. You Are Not Really Allowed To Be An Icon Unless You Also Make An Idiot Of Yourself.

Even In The Tragedies, Shakespeare Always Put In Parts For The Comic Actors Because His Audience Was Mixed. He Puts In People Who Talk Like Aristocrats. He Puts In Idiots And Fools. He Puts In Certain Middle-range Characters. And When You Go To The Globe, You Realize How That All Works. The People Who Paid More Sat In Seats Around The Edge. Everybody Else Paid A Penny. They Put It Into A Tin Box - That's Why We Call It The "box Office." They Stood In The Pit, But They Were Very Close, So When Hamlet Was Doing His Soliloquy, It Was Addressed To You, The Audience - Right There.

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