Margaret Atwood Quotes
I am not running for mayor yet. But if it comes to be true that people cannot voice an opinion unless they have been elected, then we are no longer in a democracy.
Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run.
What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.
Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is the immersion of the hands in the earth, that ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissingthe tarmac is merely a pallid vestigial remnant.
Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.
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.
Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.
'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.
I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.
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 was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.
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.
Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself.
I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.
Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.
Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn’t last long in nature. They’re too conspicuous.
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.
This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I've connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.
I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.
We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.
Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?
His mouth is on me, his hands, I can't wait and he's moving, already, love, it's been so long, I'm alive in my skin, again, arms around him, falling and water softly everywhere, never-ending.
it's doors I'm afraid of because I can't see through them, its the door opening by itself in the wind I'm afraid of.
Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.
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?
Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.
A non-event ... is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means.
We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.
I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.
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.
Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.
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.
Jimmy found himself wishing to make a dent in Crake, get a reaction; it was one of his weaknesses, to care what other people thought of him.
Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
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.
I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'?
It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.