Margaret Atwood Quotes

466 Sourced Quotes

All children "write." (And paint, and sing.) I suppose the real question is why do so many people give it up. Intimidation, I suppose. Fear of not being good. Lack of time.

Margaret Atwood
In Finnish they have no he or she words. If you're writing a novel in Finnish, you have to make gender very obvious early on, either by naming the character or by describing a sex-specific activity.

Margaret Atwood
The unique thing about writers is that they write. Therefore they are pickier about words, at least on paper.

Margaret Atwood
I don't look over my past work very much. I would not change it anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.

Margaret Atwood
Love relationships between men and women do involve power structures because men in this society have different kinds of, and more, power than women do. The problem for a woman in a relationship is how to maintain her integrity, her own personal power while also in a relationship with a man.

Margaret Atwood
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical—one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Margaret Atwood
Striptease has become less interesting since they did away with the costumes. It's become Newtonian. The movement of bodies through space, period. It can get boring.

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

Margaret Atwood
When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.

Margaret Atwood
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.

Margaret Atwood
Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.

Margaret Atwood
Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events.

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

Margaret Atwood
Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow.

Margaret Atwood
I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren't very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

Margaret Atwood
I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them.

Margaret Atwood
Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.

Margaret Atwood
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

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

Margaret Atwood
A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.

Margaret Atwood
All Creatures know that some must die That all the rest may take and eat; Sooner or later, all transform Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat. But Man alone seeks Vengefulness, And writes his abstract Laws on stone; For this false Justice he has made, He tortures limb and crushes bone. Is this the image of a god? My tooth for yours, your eye for mine? Oh, if Revenge did move the stars Instead of Love, they would not shine.

Margaret Atwood
So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

Margaret Atwood
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.

Margaret Atwood
Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift; if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.

Margaret Atwood
It's a critical fallacy of our times... that a writer should 'grow,' 'change,' or 'develop.' This fallacy causes us to expect from children or radishes: 'grow,' or there's something wrong with you. But writers are not radishes. If you look at what most writers actually do, it resembles a theme with variations more than it does the popular notion of growth.

Margaret Atwood
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary.

Margaret Atwood
I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

Margaret Atwood
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.

Margaret Atwood
When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

Margaret Atwood
All fathers except mine are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to them than meets the eye.

Margaret Atwood