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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.

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
Friends
Graduates
Learn
Gossip
School
Element
Character
Plot
Keats
Important
Distinction
Syphilis
John
Graduate
Elements
Scholarship
Novel
Speculation

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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So much better to travel than to arrive.
Margaret Atwood
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I am rather saddened at the end of a book. I think most writers find this. It's like a friend departing on a voyage.
Margaret Atwood
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Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
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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How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.
Margaret Atwood
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These things you did were like prayers you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.
Margaret Atwood
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The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
Margaret Atwood
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Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.
Margaret Atwood
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I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
Margaret Atwood
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What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
Margaret Atwood
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His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.
Margaret Atwood
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While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
Margaret Atwood
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In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood
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There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.
Margaret Atwood
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Modesty is invisibility... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.
Margaret Atwood