Michael Helm Quotes

Toronto is hard to capture in a few strokes.

Science is claiming ever more ground from popular stories of the kind we thought we weren't to believe in.

I'm not even sure if empathy is an act, it could be a disposition.

I like a great degree of compression. I like to mix lateral steps with forward ones. I don't want the prose ever to feel simply functional - at least not for any stretch.

Novels seem to exist because of this need to know and connect, and so story becomes charged with necessity.

There's some evidence that before events of mass trauma, even unpredictable ones, people begin to feel higher anxiety, often expressed in terms specific to the event.

The real past can traumatize us, but so can the real future.

Many of the concepts we once thought belonged to speculation or science fiction are now part of our understood reality.

Trauma, and certain important experiences, can imprint on us at a genetic level.

Paranoia can be a sign of a sanity in some circumstances, in some places and times.

We want to know that we're not alone with our loneliness or loss.

I seem always to have two or three novels going at once. It takes me a long time to finish one.

It's fiction's job to express how it feels to be living now, and it's a complex feeling, full of contradiction. To me it often feels like a brutal trivialization of reality.

We're getting used to reality and fantasy passing into each other. Much of the border between them has been erased.

The idea that language can be recombined to create new forms, new things, is of course very old in poetry.

I love poetry, read it a lot, but make no claim to being able to write it.

I just write what I want to read, and sometimes keeping it interesting means adding one more element that ends up adding another year to the work.

Absurdity isn't quite so absurd as it once was.