I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‘Nobody under 40,’ or ‘Nobody under 25.’ With my books, it always has been, and continues...

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster...

Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the...

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...

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans,...

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

The sun was up, the room already too warm. Light filtered in through the net curtains, hanging suspended in the air, sediment in a pond. My head felt like a sack of pulp. Still in...

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,...

To understand Homo sapiens’ primary wish list, go back to mythology. We endowed the gods with the abilities we wished we had ourselves: immortality and eternal youth, flight, resplendent beauty, total power, climate control, ultimate...

He’s lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He’s come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he’s up-to-date? Maybe...

you can’t change the past,Aunt Lou used to say.Oh, but I wanted to;that was the one thing I really wanted to do

If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

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...

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...

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.

Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar–I say, you say, he and she, it, on...

War is what happens when language fails

All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place.

I stand in the dark, start to unbutton. Then I hear something inside my body. I’ve broken, something has cracked, that must be it. Noise is coming up, coming out, of the broken place, in...

Gender roles suck,” says Swift Fox.Then you should stop playing them, thinks Toby.

Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it’s time for you to become someone else’s...

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.

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.

Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.

4. Men’s novels are about how to get power. Killing and so on, or winning and so on. So are women’s novels, though the method is different. In men’s novels, getting the woman or woman...

Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she...

I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children.

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn’t simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination....

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

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...

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.

I could end this with a moral,as if this were a fable about animals,though no fables are really about animals.

Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of...

… 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...

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...

We’ll choose knowledge no matter what, we’ll maim ourselves in the process, we’ll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive; love or grief or despair or...

It was Colonel Parkman who upped stakes, crossed the border, and named our town, thus perversely commemorating a battle in which he’d lost. (Though perhaps that’s not so unusual: many people take a curatorial interest...

There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hardshelled, firmly closed.

Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.

The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there’s a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies.

Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships…

Writing poetry is a state of free float

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...

There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like p...

An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.

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...

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.