Quote

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection.

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
Humans
Imperfection
Ratio
First
Failures
Tokens
Sacrifice
Ratios
Writing
Built
Altar
Think
Process
Altars
Thinking
Reason
Evolved
Firsts
Oblivion
Botched
Human
Muse
Drafts

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
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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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Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.
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He has been trying to sing Love into existence again And he has failed
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­Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
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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
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No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.
Margaret Atwood
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Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.
Margaret Atwood
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I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.
Margaret Atwood
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The proper study of Mankind is Everything.
Margaret Atwood
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Jimmy had been full of himself back then, thinks Snowman with indulgence and a little envy. He’d been unhappy too, of course. It went without saying, his unhappiness. He’d put a lot of energy into it.
Margaret Atwood
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The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.
Margaret Atwood
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I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.
Margaret Atwood
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Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.
Margaret Atwood
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To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.
Margaret Atwood
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Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.
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Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
Margaret Atwood