Novelist

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.

Religions in general have to rediscover their roots. In Hinduism and the Koran, animals are described as equals. If you walk into a cathedral and look at the decorations of early Christianity, there are vines, animals, creatures and birds thriving all over the stonework.

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

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

I'm a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don't like multitasking. When I'm doing one thing, I like to do just that thing.

The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.

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

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

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

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done.

The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

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

I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you can read.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.