Over at the New Yorker, Book Bench has been collecting 2010 commencement speeches delivered by novelists. They link to the complete speeches, but choose the juiciest quotes in specific categories like “Why Writing Is Like Life” and “Requisite Platitude.”

Read the whole post here, but here is a bit of gloomy advice from Jay McInerney: “the last four years might well be, for some time to come, the high-water mark in your early life.”

And here is a moment of “Humility/Coy Self-Promotion” from the great Margaret Atwood : “For who but a warty person–or, to put it in more romantic terms, one who has visited the shadow side–would have written two fun-filled, joke-packed novels about the almost total annihilation of the human race? I didn’t get any literary awards for those.”

(In lieu of an author photo, we’ve included a video of Atwood’s role in Score: A Hockey Musical)