People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.
— Margaret Atwood
Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot... they don't know what's going to happen to them.
If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.
Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.
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 bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.
You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.
I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's a little bit like having your own radio program.
The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.
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 be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it's neutral.
I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that - you can have it just the next minute; you can press the button and just have it.
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.
If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.
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.
You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.
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.
Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.
When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.
The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong.
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.
There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.
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.
Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.
Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.
You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.
Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.
Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.
We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we're so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it's not going to be around forever.
Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.
'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.
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.
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 there's a little utopia.
I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there's always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that technology just before that or one several technologies back.
I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.
I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television - there wasn't a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.
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.
A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.
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.
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 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.
There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.
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 to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is 'reader.'
When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.
Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
If I pick up a book with vampires on the cover, I want there to be vampires. 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.
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'.
I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That's science fiction; it isn't going to happen.
There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.
Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.
