Rebels defy the rules of society, risking everything to retain their humanity. If the world Atwood depicts is chilling, if 'God is losing,' the only hope for optimism is a vision that includes the inevitability of human struggle against the prevailing order.

I think even celebrities deserve their privacy. I really do. It's sort of a hideous spectacle, the public feeding on all this information.

We derive a lot of the reality of ourselves through interactions with others.

Jack Kerouac did what he most wanted to do. He wrote great prose. He became the writer he wanted to be.

A lot of artists don't survive, do they? You work very hard and finally you get what you want and it destroys you.

Nothing ever happened except God.

I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him-they were part of his “road,” the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work.