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It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.
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
Age
Biographies
Lying
Feature
Everyone
Equally
Write
Features
Book
Assuming
Disguised
Writing
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Assumes
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Fiction
Biography
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More quotes by Margaret Atwood
Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.
Margaret Atwood
Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize.
Margaret Atwood
Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.
Margaret Atwood
Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.
Margaret Atwood
Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering.
Margaret Atwood
I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
Margaret Atwood
Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.
Margaret Atwood
Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
Margaret Atwood
Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
Margaret Atwood
Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.
Margaret Atwood
Lose your temper and you lose the fight.
Margaret Atwood
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
Margaret Atwood
I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.
Margaret Atwood
Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering unlike love.
Margaret Atwood
She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.
Margaret Atwood
We've learned to see the world in gasps.
Margaret Atwood
Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
Margaret Atwood
Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.
Margaret Atwood
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
Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.
Margaret Atwood
