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You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

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
Never
Plan
Kill
Built
Plans
Human
Humans
Come
Going
Storyteller

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences.
Margaret Atwood
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Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that.
Margaret Atwood
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Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.
Margaret Atwood
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I'm not senile, I snapped. If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
Margaret Atwood
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I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.
Margaret Atwood
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I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness? In thrall, in harness. Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.
Margaret Atwood
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That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.
Margaret Atwood
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The sands of time are quicksands ... so much can sink into them without a trace.
Margaret Atwood
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Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.
Margaret Atwood
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I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived.
Margaret Atwood
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Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.
Margaret Atwood
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The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand you must see your left hand erasing it.
Margaret Atwood
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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
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It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
Margaret Atwood
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we lived in the gaps between the stories
Margaret Atwood
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I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
Margaret Atwood
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Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
Margaret Atwood
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For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.
Margaret Atwood
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You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
Margaret Atwood
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Your hand is a warm stone I hold between two words.
Margaret Atwood