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.

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 fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been.

…the values ascribed to the Indian will depend on what the white writer feels about Nature, and America has always had mixed feelings about that. At one end of the spectrum is Thoreau, wishing to...

They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as it they’d covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills.

When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Falling in love… how could he have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the...

I wish I didn’t have to think about you. You wanted to impress me; well, I’m not impressed, I’m disgusted…You wanted to make damn good and sure I’d never be able to turn over in...

We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we’re so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We...

Canada was built on dead beavers.

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...

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

The male frog, in mating season,” said Crake, “makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted to the male frog with the biggest, deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful frog,...

What thumbsuckers we all are…when it comes to mothers.

There’s nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.

Today I speak to my bones as I would speak to a dog. I want to go up the stairs, I tell them. Up, up, up, with one leg dragging. Is the ache deep in...