Top 88 Margaret Atwood Quotes

Within one’s own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

I don’t think of poetry as a ‘rational’ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you’re gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It’s yours. Seize your space.

We shouldn’t be saying ‘Save the planet’; we should be saying: ‘Save viable conditions in which people can live.’ That’s what we’re dealing with here.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

I particularly like Twitter, because it’s short and can be very funny and informative. It’s a little bit like having your own radio program.

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn’t even know you’d done.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‘race’ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‘the plot’.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

I hate to tell you this, but you will never actually go to a galaxy far, far away and encounter Darth Vader. That’s science fiction; it isn’t going to happen.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there’s less of you.

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.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.

Religions in general have to rediscover their roots. In Hinduism and the Koran, animals are described as equals. If you walk into a cathedral and look at the decorations of early Christianity, there are vines, animals, creatures and birds thriving all over the stonework.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‘Where did we come from, what happens next?’ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist.

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It’s a question of how those tools are used by people.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.

‘1984’ is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

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.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

Gardening is not a rational act.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical – one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

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.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

I’ve never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are individuals. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be that way.

Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they’re not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They’re a group phenomenon, they’re not very fast, they’re quite sickly. So what’s the pleasure of being one?

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.

Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera – or an NHL game.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there’s always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that technology just before that or one several technologies back.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.