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Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.
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
Write
Offer
Find
Otherwise
Need
Absolutely
Needs
Offers
Writing
Except
Make
Necessary
Doorknob
Men
Longer
Humiliation
Love
Attention
Poems
More quotes by Margaret Atwood
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
Margaret Atwood
I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.
Margaret Atwood
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
For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.
Margaret Atwood
How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - For Man has broke the Fellowship With murder, lust, and greed.
Margaret Atwood
His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.
Margaret Atwood
We've learned to see the world in gasps.
Margaret Atwood
You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.
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
My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.
Margaret Atwood
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
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
Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.
Margaret Atwood
But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.
Margaret Atwood
I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.
Margaret Atwood
I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.
Margaret Atwood
Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
Margaret Atwood
The society in 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
Margaret Atwood
Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.
Margaret Atwood
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
Margaret Atwood
