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 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...

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

As Charles Darwin said, ‘The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,’ says the Spirit. ‘All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn’t be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not...

Of course (said Oryx), having a money value was no substitute for love. Every child should have love, every person should have it. . . . but love was undependable, it came and then it...

There were places you didn’t want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on lights. These things you did were like prayers; you...

People always forget about prophecies unless they come true.

Lilies used to be a movie theatre, before. Students went there a lot; every spring they had a Humphrey Bogart festival, with Lauren Bacall or Katherine Hepburn, women on their own, making up their minds....

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was...

I tend to feel if people say they’re going to do something, they will, if given the chance.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.

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...

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...

The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn’t fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.

You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and...

It isn’t the sort of thing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know.

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

He said, I won’t have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beauty, not to mention anatomy. If a real woman was built like that she’d...

They will not let you have peace, they don’t want you to have anything they don’t have themselves.

When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

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.

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...

I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

Gardening is not a rational act.

There may not be one Truth – there may be several truths – but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

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...

Once upon a time you could wander around one country, then the next and then maybe you’d go to England or wherever. Now they all want you to do it at the same time and...

Having long ago whispered I want to die, I now realize that this wish will indeed be fulfilled, and sooner rather than later. No matter that I’ve changed my mind about it.

Point being that you don’t have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don’t have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That...

Why is it always such a surprise? thinks Toby. The moon. Even though we know it’s coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush.

How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to...

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

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...

A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved.

Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to...

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.

A language is everything you do.

I won’t fatten them in cages, though. I won’t ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won’t change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won’t drain out their life’s blood. They can do...

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

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...

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.

They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to

In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven what is has always been: in that way children inhabit the realm of myth.

I shouldn’t have taken a vow of silence, I told myself. What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration...

Don’t interfere with false gods, you’ll get the gold paint all over your hands.