Quote

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.

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
First
Rate
Going
Case
Unless
Second
Cases
Artist
Art
Firsts
Loyalty

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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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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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.
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You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
Margaret Atwood
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Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.
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You're dead, Cordelia.' No I'm not. 'Yes you are. You're dead. Lie down.
Margaret Atwood
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When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
Margaret Atwood
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I feel like the word shatter.
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.
Margaret Atwood
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It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.
Margaret Atwood
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We've learned to see the world in gasps.
Margaret Atwood
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We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.
Margaret Atwood
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Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.
Margaret Atwood
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Perhaps they were looking for passion perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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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
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The short answer to 'Why do you write' is - I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life to go places I haven't been to examine life on earth to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible to be surprised.
Margaret Atwood
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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
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Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.
Margaret Atwood
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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
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People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.
Margaret Atwood