There may not be one Truth – there may be several truths – but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.
History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.
The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not ‘Am I really that oppressed?’ but ‘Am I really that boring?’
We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.
Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.
Powerlessness and silence go together.
I’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.
Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.
Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk.
I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.
Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.
Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind.
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.
What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else.
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.
Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.
I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences.
The past is a closed door.
When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me – yet – the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.
No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.