Quote

In theory I can do almost anything certainly I have been told how. In practice I do as little as possible. I pretend to myself that I would be quite happy in a hermit's cave, living on gruel, if someone else would make the gruel. Gruel, like so many other things, is beyond me.

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
Would
Else
Theory
Gruel
Like
Someone
Told
Hermit
Littles
Quite
Hermits
Anything
Almost
Cave
Little
Possible
Caves
Many
Practice
Pretend
Make
Happy
Certainly
Things
Living
Beyond

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
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For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
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The internet is 95 percent porn and spam
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The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.
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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
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I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived.
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Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
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Why do men feel threatened by women?
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Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave - The water below is as dark as the grave, And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat
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Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.
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In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught creative writing. We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.
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In the evenings there's been thunder, a distant bumping and stumbling, like God on a sullen binge.
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He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.
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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.
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All writers must go from now to once a upon a time all must go from here to there all must descend to where the stories are kept all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.
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We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat.
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I was delighted with the film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth] it almost made me want to be a film-maker!
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You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
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While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
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When any civilization is dust and ashes, he said, art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.
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