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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: 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
Reason
Writing
Ratio
Ratios
Evolved
Failures
Built
Process
More quotes by Margaret Atwood
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.
Margaret Atwood
You shouldn't do that, said Laura. You could set yourself on fire.
Margaret Atwood
If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
Margaret Atwood
Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers take me to your deaths. These are worth it. These are what I have come for.
Margaret Atwood
... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.
Margaret Atwood
I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.
Margaret Atwood
I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.
Margaret Atwood
While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.
Margaret Atwood
Science is not something that exists apart from human beings. It's one of the things we do as human beings, and we always have done science and technology in some form.
Margaret Atwood
It isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.
Margaret Atwood
I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
Margaret Atwood
I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea.
Margaret Atwood
But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries.
Margaret Atwood
It used to be that your bloodlines dictated who you were. But the U.S. became the land of the self-made man, in which not only did you make a fortune but you could make up everything else about yourself as well. You move into a new town with a spurious pedigreed background and you just make yourself up.
Margaret Atwood
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
Margaret Atwood
The scroll is coming back (Twitter is a scroll.)
Margaret Atwood
If you disagree with your government, that's political. If you disagree with your government that is approaching theocracy, then you're evil.
Margaret Atwood
Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.
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
Disease has always been a much bigger killer of human beings than wars.
Margaret Atwood
