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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.

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
Certain
Rivers
Need
Across
Needs
Physical
Kind
Walk
Writer
Amount
Nerve
Walks
Nerves
Almost
River

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.
Margaret Atwood
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For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.
Margaret Atwood
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We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet' we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.
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The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.
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Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.
Margaret Atwood
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The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil
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Without the light, no chance without the dark, no dance.
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If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
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I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful.
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Though as he'd say, what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?
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What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
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Extreme good, extreme evil: the abilities required are similar.
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poetry is where the language is renewed.
Margaret Atwood
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We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
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I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
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Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.
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All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.
Margaret Atwood
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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
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I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.
Margaret Atwood
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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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