Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.

You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

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.

When we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up. Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.

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.