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I never say I'm an ist of any kind unless I know how the other person is defining it.

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
Defining
Unless
Persons
Person
Kind
Never

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.
Margaret Atwood
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I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
Margaret Atwood
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If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
Margaret Atwood
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Karen wasn't hard, she was soft, too soft. A soft touch. Her hair was soft, her smile was soft, her voice was soft. She was so soft there was no resistance. Hard things sank into her, they went right through her, and if she made a real effort, out the other side. Then she didn't have to see them or hear them, or even touch them.
Margaret Atwood
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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.
Margaret Atwood
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Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
Margaret Atwood
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Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
Margaret Atwood
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But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.
Margaret Atwood
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All fat women look the same they all look 42.
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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If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.
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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You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.
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.
Margaret Atwood
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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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Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!
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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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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Toast is me. I am toast.
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