Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Romance
Persons
Changes
Person
Aren
Book
Unless
Different
Particular
Way
Reading
Harlequin
Read
Romances
Slightly
Next

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

Image
Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
Margaret Atwood
Image
As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this'.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Those walls and bars are there for a reason,” said Crake. “Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.” “Them?” “Nature and God.” “I thought you didn’t believe in God,” said Jimmy. “I don’t believe in Nature either,” said Crake. “Or not with a capital N.
Margaret Atwood
Image
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.
Margaret Atwood
Image
You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye
Margaret Atwood
Image
I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together no, I'm taking it apart. If you'd wanted the narrative line you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell. That was before I discovered the virtues of scissors, the virtues of matches.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Choice of evils debates always produce extremism - people choose what they hope is the lesser evil, then call it good and demonize the other choice. It will be a challenge for your generation to synthesize - to move beyond Us versus Them, to We.
Margaret Atwood
Image
When I finally went to school I had to adjust to other girls and learn their fiendish ways. Having learnt them, I turned them on all and sundry.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.
Margaret Atwood
Image
We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.
Margaret Atwood
Image
I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Nobody quite knows the truth about cats purring, but it does seem to be also a self-healing thing for them, which is why, when you take your cat to the vet and it's frightened, it will purr.
Margaret Atwood
Image
The problem is huge. We've just added seventy-five million people to the already large proportion of people in the world who are malnourished all the time, whose bodies are being starved.
Margaret Atwood
Image
Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back it was always there in oral storytelling.
Margaret Atwood
Image
For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.
Margaret Atwood
Image
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
Image
Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.
Margaret Atwood
Image
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
Image
Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.
Margaret Atwood
Image
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