I want, I don’t want.How can one live with such a heart?

The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don’t move. As long as I lie still. The difference between...

But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife...

How could I be sleeping with this particular man…. Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.

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...

A Sad ChildYou’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 dollyou need to sleep.Well, all children are sadbut some...

There is never only one, of anyone

The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the...

Ah men,why do you want all this attention?I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutelynecessary. What do you have to offer meI can’t find otherwiseexcept humiliation? Which I no longerneed.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

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...

The Governor’s wife cuts these crimes out of the newspapers and pastes them in; she will even write away for old newspapers with crimes that were done before her time. It is her collection, she...

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

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...

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.

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. Reality simply consists of different points of...

No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.

I write as if I’ve lived a lot of things I haven’t lived.

Ihmisen usko jumaliin on kehittynyt evoluution myötä, joten meidän taipumuksessamme uskoon täytyy olla jotain etua evoluution kannalta. Ankaran materialistinen käsitys – että me olemme koe, jota eläinproteiini suorittaa itsellään – on useimpien mielestä aivan liian...

The Dead Hand, yeah, it was, like, seminal, but tame by today’s standards. Violet, for instance, did not get her intestines ripped out. There wasn’t any torture, nobody’s liver got fried in a pan, there...

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness.

It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances;...

What were prizes but one more level of control imposed on Art by the establishment?

Condoms seemed to her inherently wicked. But they were also inherently funny. They were like rubber gloves with only one finger, and every time she saw one she had to be severe with herself or...

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...

The whole world is now one vast uncontrollable experiment – the way it always was, Crake would have said – and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.

Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn’t 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...

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

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...

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

But I have already told the beginning, so right now it’s the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story.I am not...

The basic Female body comes with the following accessories: garter belt, panty-girdle, crinoline, camisole, bustle, brassiere, stomacher, chemise, virgin zone, spike heels, nose ring, veil, kid gloves, fishnet stockings, fichu, bandeau, Merry Widow, weepers, chokers,...

I consider telling my brother, asking him for help. But tell him what exactly? I have no black eyes, no bloody noses to report: Cordelia does nothing physical. If it was boys, chasing or teasing,...

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.

We shouldn’t have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you’d be doomed. You’d be ruined as God....

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...

Perhaps its not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf.

The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening...

It’s psychic. It’s the age. It’s chemical.

I love you. You’re the only one.” She isn’t the first woman he’s ever said that to. He shouldn’t have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn’t have treated it like...

I’m not going to have a husband anyway,” said Laura. “I’m going to live by myself in the garage.

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

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.