Michael Helm

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Paranoia can be a sign of a sanity in some circumstances, in some places and times.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Sanity
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Absurdity isn't quite so absurd as it once was.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Absurd
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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.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Lying
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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.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Writing
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I love poetry, read it a lot, but make no claim to being able to write it.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Writing
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The idea that language can be recombined to create new forms, new things, is of course very old in poetry.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Ideas
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We're getting used to reality and fantasy passing into each other. Much of the border between them has been erased.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Reality
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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.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Jobs
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I seem always to have two or three novels going at once. It takes me a long time to finish one.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Two
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We want to know that we're not alone with our loneliness or loss.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Loneliness
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Science is claiming ever more ground from popular stories of the kind we thought we weren't to believe in.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Believe
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Trauma, and certain important experiences, can imprint on us at a genetic level.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Important
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Many of the concepts we once thought belonged to speculation or science fiction are now part of our understood reality.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Reality
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The real past can traumatize us, but so can the real future.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Real
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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.
- Michael Helm
Collection: People
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Novels seem to exist because of this need to know and connect, and so story becomes charged with necessity.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Needs
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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.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Ideas
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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.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Want
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I'm not even sure if empathy is an act, it could be a disposition.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Empathy
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Toronto is hard to capture in a few strokes.
- Michael Helm
Collection: Toronto