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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: 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
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Physical
Kind
Walk
Writer
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Nerve
Walks
Nerves
Almost
River
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Rivers
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Across

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.
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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.
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I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.
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A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.
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I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.
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...how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won't or can't love you. As a species we're pathetic that way: imperfectly monogamous.
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In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
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I myself have 12 hats and each one represents a different personality. Why just be yourself.
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More of your brain is involved when reading than it is when you watch television... because you are supplying just about everything... you're a creator.
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If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?
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I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.
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How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
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... 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.
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Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
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Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.
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By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.
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Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don't care if you are male, female, or an elephant.
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I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's a little bit like having your own radio program.
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Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
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Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.
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