I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it….By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you….Because I’...
History is a construct...Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still there are definitive moments...We can look at these events and say that after them things were never the sa...
He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldn't reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if they'd drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even thoug...
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 f...
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.
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 uses. And it can b...
If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.
You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading. As a craft it's acquired through the apprentice system, but you choose your own teachers. Sometimes they're alive, sometimes dead.As a v...
Though I knew how this failure would hurt you, I had to fold like a grey moth and let go.You could not believe I was more than your echo.
This murdered girl troubles me. After the first shock, nobody at school says much about her. Even Cordelia does not want to talk about her. It’s as if this girl has done something shameful, herself, b...
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...
The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread.
The genres, it is thought, have other designs on us. They want to entertain, as opposed to rubbing our noses in the daily grit produced by the daily grind. Unhappily for realistic novelists, the large...
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.
In the east a bank of cloud rises up silently like dark bread.
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.
I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.
Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn't changed for thousands of years because as far as we can tell the human template hasn't changed either. W...
Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, aga...
And the evening was so beautiful, that it made a pain in my heart, as when you cannot tell wether you are happy or sad; and I thought that if I could have a wish, it would be that nothing would ever c...