You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.

You aren't sick & unhappy only alive & stuck with it.

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.

Science fiction went through a period that was mostly object-oriented or inventions for distant galaxies.But 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.

That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.

The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.