Margaret Atwood Quotes

The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.

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

Love is the pursuit of shadows.

I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.

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.

Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant.

My favorite author's question of all time - because it's so simple to answer ... 'Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done?

Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it; it went over you and you came out flat.

I am not your justification for existence.

A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.

for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.

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

You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse.

The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.

Freedom, like everything else, is relative.

Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk.

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.

You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good, because I know you can't.

Toast is me. I am toast.

Yelling is a form of publishing

When I finally went to school I had to adjust to other girls and learn their fiendish ways. Having learnt them, I turned them on all and sundry.

Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.

Her glass wings are gone.

Too much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.

Despite their cool poses they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all.

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

He considers me also a little fragile because artistic. I need to be cared for, like a potted plant.

It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.

No luck was dumb because luck was just another name for miracle.

Human reason is a pin dancing on the head of an angel, so small is it in comparison to the Divine vastness that encircles us.

There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.

No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.

Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.

Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.

Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.

For drinking Life there are two cups: The No Cup is bitter, the Yes Cup is yummy -- Now, which one would you rather have in your tummy?

oil paints...the look of licked lips.

making final judgements about poets, cities or regions on the basis of an anthology is always dangerous: anthologies are mirages created, finally, by their editors.

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

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

Literature is not only a mirror; it is a map, a geography of the mind.

Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.

Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

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

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.

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