Margaret Atwood Quotes - Page 32

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

  Margaret Atwood

  Character, Cutting, Views

  Interview with Marilyn Berlin Snell, www.motherjones.com. July/August 1997.

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• How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.

  Margaret Atwood

  Slides, Easy, Treachery

  Margaret Atwood (2014). “The MaddAddam Trilogy Bundle: The Year of the Flood; Oryx & Crake; MaddAddam”, p.595, Anchor

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• 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.

  Margaret Atwood

  Focus, What If, Doe

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• Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female,
  you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made at least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.

  Margaret Atwood

  Suicide, Running, Years

  "Margaret Atwood : Writing Philosophy". Waterstone's Poetry Lecture, Delivered At Hay On Wye, canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca. June 1995.

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• After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing; and
  through them, and some of my teachers, I discovered that there was a whole subterranean Wonderland of Canadian writing that was going on just out of general earshot and sight.

  Margaret Atwood

  Teacher, Writing, Two

  "Margaret Atwood : Writing Philosophy". Waterstone's Poetry Lecture, Delivered At Hay On Wye, canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca. June 1995.

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• I feel that the task of criticizing my poetry is best left to others (i.e. critics) and would much rather have it take place after I am dead. If at all.

  Margaret Atwood

  Poetry, Tasks, Criticize

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• I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood.

  Margaret Atwood

  Girl, Volleyball, Blood

  Margaret Atwood (1988). “Cat's eye”, Doubleday, 1989

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• Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.

  Margaret Atwood

  Pain, Mistake, Long

  Margaret Atwood (2004). “Oryx and Crake”, p.243, Anchor

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• Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

  Margaret Atwood

  Sadness, Two, Together

  Margaret Atwood (2010). “The Year Of The Flood”, p.211, Hachette UK

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• I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

  Margaret Atwood

  Age, Sixteen, Faults

  "Margaret Atwood: Writing Philosophy". Margaret Atwood's Waterstone's poetry lecture at Hay On Wye in Wales, canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca. June 1995.

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• I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.

  Margaret Atwood

  Writing, Long, Perfect

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• There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

  Margaret Atwood

  Writing, Genre, Mediocre

  Interview with David Haglund, www.slate.com. October 17, 2011.

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• oil paints...the look of licked lips.

  Margaret Atwood

  Oil, Looks, Lips

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• 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.

  Margaret Atwood

  Real, Book, Reading

  "Double bluff". Interview with Katharine Viner, www.theguardian.com. September 26, 2000.

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• It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.

  Margaret Atwood

  Curiosity, Fiction, Want

  Margaret Atwood (1990). “Margaret Atwood: Conversations”, Princeton, N.J. : Ontario Review Press

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• The road to death is a lonely highway, and longer than it apears, even when it leads straight down from the scaffold, by way of a rope; and it's a dark road, with never any moon shining on it, to light your way.

  Margaret Atwood

  Death, Lonely, Dark

  Margaret Atwood (2011). “Alias Grace: A Novel”, p.258, Anchor

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• The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.

  Margaret Atwood

  Stars, Thinking, White

  Margaret Atwood (1989). “Cat's Eye”, Bantam

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• There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt.

  Margaret Atwood

  Powerful, Naughty, Whispering

  FaceBook post by Margaret Atwood from Jan 26, 2012

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• You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

  Margaret Atwood

  Time, Water, Looks

  Margaret Atwood (1989). “Cat's Eye”, Bantam

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

  Margaret Atwood

  Optimistic, Mean, Reality

  FaceBook post by Margaret Atwood from Jul 21, 2016

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• The cat jumps up on the bed and tries to get onto my head. It's his way of telling whether or not i'm dead. If i'm not, he wants to be scratched; if i am - he'll think of something

  Margaret Atwood

  Cat, Thinking, Trying

  Margaret Atwood (2015). “Morning in the Burned House”, p.22, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else.

  Margaret Atwood

  Territory, Needs, Maps

  "Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature". Book by Margaret Atwood, 1972.

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• The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do it because I was a girl. They simply found the entire proposition ridiculous. Writers were dead and English, or else extremely elderly and American; they were not sixteen years old and Canadian.

  Margaret Atwood

  Girl, Elderly, Years

  "Writing Philosophy". Waterstone's Poetry Lecture, Delivered at Hay on Wye. Wales, canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca. June 1995.

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• Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course - being also a novelist - am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

  Margaret Atwood

  Plato, Liars, Lying

  "Margaret Atwood : Writing Philosophy". Waterstone's Poetry Lecture, Delivered At Hay On Wye, canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca. June 1995.

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• Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.

  Margaret Atwood

  Book, Sea, Bottles

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