Quote

Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.

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
Conceal
Defending
Laughter
Anger
Game
Games
Joker
Also
Retaliation
May
Instruct

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It's in Macbeth: The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon. I seldom have occasion to pull it out, but it's ready and waiting!
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If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.
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If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.
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Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.
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Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.
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Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
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Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
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It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
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So that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.
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Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones without them there'd be no stories.
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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.
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If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive.
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As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter.
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As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.
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If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.
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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.
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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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The idea of the chickens with the multiple breasts and thighs came from an urban legend that some fast-food places had developed chickens with four thighs. It wasn't true, but it is a suggestive rumor.
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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.
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Now I can see how that can happen. You can fall in love with anybody--a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.
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