Margaret Atwood Quotes.
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not ‘Am I really that oppressed?’ but ‘Am I really that boring?’
Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.
War is what happens when language fails.
Where do the words go when we have said them?
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
I exist in two places, here and where you are.
Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that ‘Oryx and Crake’ is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it’s neutral.
If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.
This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But 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.
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.
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.
I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‘Nobody under 40,’ or ‘Nobody under 25.’ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‘reader.’
Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.
I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
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.
