Margaret Atwood Quotes

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that’s because I’m doing it wrong.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we’re so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it’s not going to be around forever.

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It’s a question of how those tools are used by people.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.

There may not be one Truth – there may be several truths – but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

‚1984‘ is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they’re not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They’re a group phenomenon, they’re not very fast, they’re quite sickly. So what’s the pleasure of being one?

The thing about delirium is you think it’s great, but it actually isn’t.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don’t know the plot. They don’t know their own individual plot… they don’t know what’s going to happen to them.

I’m a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don’t like multitasking. When I’m doing one thing, I like to do just that thing.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

I don’t think of poetry as a ‚rational‘ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical – one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

I’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.

I tend to feel if people say they’re going to do something, they will, if given the chance.

I don’t think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It’s essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy – people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online – but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can’t use the net unless you can read.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

We shouldn’t be saying ‚Save the planet‘; we should be saying: ‚Save viable conditions in which people can live.‘ That’s what we’re dealing with here.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.

I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

I’m from the generation that had the boys‘ door and the girls‘ door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.

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.

Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera – or an NHL game.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there’s always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that technology just before that or one several technologies back.

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That’s science fiction; it isn’t going to happen.

If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.

Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.