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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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Margaret Atwood
Age: 84
Born: 1939
Born: November 18
Essayist
Inventor
Literary Critic
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Ottawa (Ontario)
Margaret Eleanor Atwood
Failures
Built
Process
Reason
Writing
Ratio
Ratios
Evolved
More quotes by Margaret Atwood
Marshall McLuhan is absolutely right, we are always looking in the rear view mirror.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
What a moron I was to think you were sweet and innocent, when it turns out you were actually college-educated the whole time!
Margaret Atwood
The characters [of The Tempest] have always been favorites of mine. It is one of his meditations on art - what it does.
Margaret Atwood
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
Margaret Atwood
I myself have 12 hats and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself.
Margaret Atwood
About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
Margaret Atwood
A voice is a human gift it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood
Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.
Margaret Atwood
Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
Margaret Atwood
Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
Margaret Atwood
I'm a Red Tory. To get a fix on this category, you have to go back to the 19th century. The Tories were the ones who believed that those in power had a responsibility to the community, that money should not be the measure of all things.
Margaret Atwood
There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
Margaret Atwood
History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.
Margaret Atwood
It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.
Margaret Atwood
Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.
Margaret Atwood
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
Margaret Atwood
As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.
Margaret Atwood
I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
Margaret Atwood
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