Novelist

Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

I'm from the generation that had the boys' door and the girls' door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.

I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.

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 the city, shoe shops and school.

You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.

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.

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don't want to open up my cornflakes and find that they're full of pebbles... You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn't.

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It's a question of how those tools are used by people.

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 view.

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

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.