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.
About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
Love is the pursuit of shadows...
Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it; it went over you and you came out flat.
I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.
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.
Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress.
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.
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 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.
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.
When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
Being edited is like falling face down into a threshing machine.
Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don’t care if you are male, female, or an elephant.
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.
Life’s not fair; why should I be?
The goals of the feminist movement have not been achieved, and those who claim we’re living in a post-feminist era are either sadly mistaken or tired of thinking about the whole subject.
Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.