In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.

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

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

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.

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.

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

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

A word after a word after a word is power.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

War is what happens when language fails.

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

Gardening is not a rational act.

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

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

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

This above all, to refuse to be a victim.

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

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

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

Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

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

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

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

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 plot'.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you're going to say, 'Where did we come from, what happens next?' The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.

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

Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

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.

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn't write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

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.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

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.

I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.