Quote

Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.

Margaret Atwood

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Similar
Extremes
Ability
Evil
Good
Abilities
Required
Extreme

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.
Margaret Atwood
Image
As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this'.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Blank pages inspire me with terror.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
Margaret Atwood
Image
If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
Margaret Atwood
Image
If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
Margaret Atwood
Image
As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.
Margaret Atwood
Image
This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
Margaret Atwood
Image
What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
Margaret Atwood
Image
It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.
Margaret Atwood
Image
He needed to exist only in the present, without guilt, without expectation.
Margaret Atwood
Image
There is never only one, of anyone
Margaret Atwood
Image
My parents were gardeners themselves, and perforce they used environmental techniques because it was during the war, and you didn't have the new sorts of chemicals.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I have never had any problems with editors who wanted me to change my methods or point of view. I pay a lot of attention to editors, but in a different way. They sometimes catch mistakes and help with the order of poems in a book. I do not underestimate them! Indeed, I have been one myself.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Why do men feel threatened by women?
Margaret Atwood
Image
we lived in the gaps between the stories
Margaret Atwood