Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.
Margaret Atwood
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Kind
Perhaps
Underworld
Something
Dead
Risky
Make
Bring
Fascination
Desire
Mortality
Fear
Trip
Someone
Motivated
Back
Narrative
Writing
Deep
More quotes by Margaret Atwood
I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you can read.
Margaret Atwood
at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade your deserts your private dinosaurs the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.
Margaret Atwood
Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.
Margaret Atwood
Choice of evils debates always produce extremism - people choose what they hope is the lesser evil, then call it good and demonize the other choice. It will be a challenge for your generation to synthesize - to move beyond Us versus Them, to We.
Margaret Atwood
I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.
Margaret Atwood
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
Margaret Atwood
The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.
Margaret Atwood
How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
Margaret Atwood
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
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
Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.
Margaret Atwood
Write down the thoughts and even more, write down a specific line. If you don't, it'll fly away forever.
Margaret Atwood
It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
Margaret Atwood
It's very hard for students not to be in debt unless they've got big scholarships or rich parents. And it's called investing in your future, but like any investment it's risky because your future is an unknown quantity. However, if you don't invest in your future, you may be flipping hamburgers for the rest of your life. So it's a real dilemma.
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
The scroll is coming back (Twitter is a scroll.)
Margaret Atwood
I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate. I would prefer to stay in the Writing Burrow and play with my imaginary friends and enemies. I get sucked into these things.
Margaret Atwood
Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and far more complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.
Margaret Atwood
But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.
Margaret Atwood
A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.
Margaret Atwood