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In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught creative writing. We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.

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
Age
Fiction
Write
Longer
Sixteen
Stills
Told
Grammar
School
Started
Published
Still
Taught
Prose
Ever
Creative
Couldn
Writing
High
Poetry
Things
Literature
Took

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong.
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There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
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A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?
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What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.
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Where do the words go when we have said them?
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Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out.
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I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed.
Margaret Atwood
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I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.
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.
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No matter how much you've been warned, Death always comes without knocking. Why now? is the cry. Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk.
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Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
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.
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Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.
Margaret Atwood
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This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future the place of caught breath.
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Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.
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'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.
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Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.
Margaret Atwood
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Though as he'd say, what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?
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While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.
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