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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?

Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: November 18
Essayist
Inventor
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Ottawa (Ontario)
Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Faces
Problem
Every
Utopia
People
Literary
Stick
Sticks
Fit
Ones

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.
Margaret Atwood
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I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.
Margaret Atwood
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A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
Margaret Atwood
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Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.
Margaret Atwood
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The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.
Margaret Atwood
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Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.
Margaret Atwood
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As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this'.
Margaret Atwood
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The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong.
Margaret Atwood
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Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
Margaret Atwood
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You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.
Margaret Atwood
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If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.
Margaret Atwood
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I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you've already done the good writing, you'll still need the good luck. It's a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.
Margaret Atwood
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All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.
Margaret Atwood
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Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.
Margaret Atwood
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Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.
Margaret Atwood
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Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.
Margaret Atwood
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Once a month I wake in the night, slippery with terror. I'm afraid, not because there's someone in the room, in the dark, in the bed, but because there isn't. I'm afraid of the emptiness, which lies beside me like a corpse.
Margaret Atwood
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The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
Margaret Atwood
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Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.
Margaret Atwood
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Those walls and bars are there for a reason,” said Crake. “Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.” “Them?” “Nature and God.” “I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy. “I don’t believe in Nature either,” said Crake. “Or not with a capital N.
Margaret Atwood