Margaret Atwood Quotes

Or he’d watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mam...

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

Writing poetry is a state of free float

Gardening is not a rational act.

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

A voice is a human gift it should be cherished and used to utter as fully human speech as possible...

Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different tim...

You learn to write by reading and writing, writing and reading. As a craft it's acquired through the...

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

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

If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most peopl...

Is there no end to his diguises of benevolence?

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

...yes, in the obscured sky a moon does float, newly, a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a go...

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

What did they want from it? Lechery, smut, confirmation of their worst suspicions. But perhaps some ...

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

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for lo...

Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge numbe...

But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It ca...

She's just jealous, people say, as if jealousy is something minor. But it's not, it's the worst, it'...

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I wa...

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

Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships....

Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it's used for b...

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania that of Canada is paranoid schiz...

Fear has a smell as Love does.

I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with wo...

Surviving Is the only warWe can afford

I'm not going to have a husband anyway," said Laura. "I'm going to live by myself in the garage.

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

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was think...

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society...

Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Give...

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

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

You're sad because you're sad.It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical.Go see a shrink or take a pi...

To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

Here the children have a custom. After the celebration of evil they take those vacant heads that sho...

Sons branch out but one woman leads to another.

Does feminist mean large unpleasant person who'll shout at you or someone who believes women are hum...

You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that ...

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriousl...

A truth should exist,it should not be usedlike this. If I love youis that a fact or a weapon?

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

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee ... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and...

War is what happens when language fails.

There is the staircase,there is the sun.There is the kitchen,the plate with toast and strawberry jam...

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window cloud...

Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Can...

Please don't make the mistake of thinking that 'Oryx and Crake' is anti-science. Science is a way of...

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed an...

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

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-size...

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space betwee...

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least h...

Some of these stories, it is understood, are not to be passed on to my father, because they would up...

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

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

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is...

To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out while he himself puts them on like a sock...

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

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor ...

Pearls are congealed oyster spit.

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

If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one.

Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, ...

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl th...

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear ...

If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they forc...

nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look--my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath o...

I stand in the dark, start to unbutton. Then I hear something inside my body. I've broken, something...

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.… I think it’s very much ...

If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.

The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively...

There are some women who seem to be born without fear just as there are people who are born without...

I write as if I’ve lived a lot of things I haven’t lived.

You fit into melike a hook into an eyea fish hookan open eye

The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.

I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cann...

Ah men,why do you want all this attention?I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if a...

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles dr...

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and...

The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many f...

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

UPYou wake up filled with dread.There seems no reason for it.Morning light sifts through the window,...

The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of t...

It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor's wife should cut them all out and p...

He said, I won't have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beau...

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes ...

If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab ...

I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.

A lot of people call you a feminist painter.""What indeed," I say. "I hate party lines, I hate ghett...

The internet is 95 percent porn and spam

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Dart...

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All ...

​Now I'm awake to the world. I was asleep before. That's how we let it happen. When they slaughtered...

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be whe...

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no yo...

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because the...