Quote

Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.

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
Coming
Form
Minuses
Back
Pluses
Always
Oral
Returning
Online
Forms
Short

More quotes by Margaret Atwood

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Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow.
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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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Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
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I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.
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I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
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For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.
Margaret Atwood
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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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A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.
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I would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.
Margaret Atwood
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Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.
Margaret Atwood
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Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering.
Margaret Atwood
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We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.
Margaret Atwood
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Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back it was always there in oral storytelling.
Margaret Atwood
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Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.
Margaret Atwood
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I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
Margaret Atwood
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...and nostalgia swept through Jimmy like a sudden hunger.
Margaret Atwood
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Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate it would be romance, bad luck.
Margaret Atwood
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Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.
Margaret Atwood
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A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
Margaret Atwood
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Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.
Margaret Atwood