Margaret Atwood Quotes

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. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Within one’s own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges – on gifts, trades, loans – and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that – you can have it just the next minute; you can press the button and just have it.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

Our problem right now is that we’re so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there’s a little utopia.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I’m a realist.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘

You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.

I particularly like Twitter, because it’s short and can be very funny and informative. It’s a little bit like having your own radio program.

There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

War is what happens when language fails.

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you’re gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It’s yours. Seize your space.

Gardening is not a rational act.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

If I waited for perfection… I would never write a word.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‚race‘ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

I’m a strict, strict agnostic. It’s very different from a casual, ‚I don’t know.‘ It’s that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can’t present it as fact.

People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.

You could tell ‚The Handmaid’s Tale‘ from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there’s less of you.

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn’t simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

If you’re put on a pedestal, you’re supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

The threat to the planet is us. It’s actually not a threat to the planet – it’s a threat to us.

The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not ‚Am I really that oppressed?‘ but ‚Am I really that boring?‘

Myths can’t be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.