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I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
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
Like
Philosophical
Write
Best
Book
Writing
Always
Think
Thinking
More quotes by Margaret Atwood
So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.
Margaret Atwood
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
We do not know how we'd behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters.
Margaret Atwood
You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.
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
The farther north you go, the fewer fruits and vegetables there are. What kind of apple trees do you suggest the Inuit get their apples from? And how much oil is expended transporting such things out there? It's an equation.
Margaret Atwood
Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.
Margaret Atwood
Karen wasn't hard, she was soft, too soft. A soft touch. Her hair was soft, her smile was soft, her voice was soft. She was so soft there was no resistance. Hard things sank into her, they went right through her, and if she made a real effort, out the other side. Then she didn't have to see them or hear them, or even touch them.
Margaret Atwood
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
Margaret Atwood
As William Gibson says, the future is already here but it's lumpy. It's unevenly distributed. Some people are already living this, the ones on low-lying islands off the coast of India are being swept away, you know, it's already happening to some people. We happen to be very lucky so far.
Margaret Atwood
Why are you so interested in amoebas? Oh, they're immortal, he said, and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a person is getting too complicated.
Margaret Atwood
Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?
Margaret Atwood
The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong.
Margaret Atwood
About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.
Margaret Atwood
Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.
Margaret Atwood
I'm a Red Tory. To get a fix on this category, you have to go back to the 19th century. The Tories were the ones who believed that those in power had a responsibility to the community, that money should not be the measure of all things.
Margaret Atwood
Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.
Margaret Atwood
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
Margaret Atwood
All fathers are invisible in daytime daytime is ruled by mothers and fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to fathers than meets the eye.
Margaret Atwood
No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
Margaret Atwood
