Michael Helm Quotes

Toronto is hard to capture in a few strokes.

We can't write a serious novel in the 21st century without acknowledging the inescapable self-awareness we're stuck with. The idea we're surrounded by falsehoods and lies. It's hard for the thinking person to believe in narratives. And yet we want some place to invest our belief.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The novel's not the best form for disposing ideas, though that's one thing it can do. It likely is the best form, though, for conveying the experience of us each being alone, trapped in our skulls with only these bodies and this imperfect instrument of language to convey our state and to find meaning and connection.

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.

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