Top 893 Quotes & Sayings by Margaret Atwood - Page 15

My parents were gardeners themselves, and perforce they used environmental techniques because it was during the war, and you didn't have the new sorts of chemicals.

In the First World War, people would be receiving letters from loved ones who had been dead for weeks, and they would not know until that black-bordered telegram arrived. I remember, of course, when it was letters only, or the telephone, and you did not make expensive long-distance calls unless it was, "Come home to the funeral," or the like.

Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling.

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. There are all kinds of other things that we are not supposed to sell - political influence being one of them. We too rarely have public conversations about the common sense of money. We too rarely talk about the human cost of putting some of these economic measures into effect.

You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.

You think you have the amount of money that is your credit limit. We're just wired to think that, you know? Until the bill arrives - a sobering moment - you think you're richer than you are.

The interesting thing about the religious component, for me, is that Jesus hardly mentions sex at all. He's pretty interested in the poor, he's pretty interested in selling your worldly goods and storing up riches in heaven. However, religious fundamentalists have made it all about sex, and that's like saying, "Look at the sex and we're just not going to talk about what you may be doing in a financial way that is sinful."

My family was scientifically inclined: My brother did turn into a neurophysiologist, and I almost became a scientist myself. I could have gone that way.

Just as if you do a mash-up of reality from the point of view of African Americans in this country, you're going to end up with something that will say, "This is Black Lives Matter." It's not that people necessarily have started out from that premise. But if you're looking at reality, that will be the result because that is reality.

Each form has its pluses and its minuses.

It was very interesting to me that when Louisiana was destroyed in that flood the fundamentalists were very quick to say, it's the punishment of God on a sinful city. Now that the oil industry has been so hard hit in Galveston, are they up on their pulpits saying, God is punishing the oil industry? No, no, no!

My father was a forest entomologist, which means he was aware that spraying forests for spruce budworm was counterproductive in that it didn't really work, and it killed everything else in the forests, and it wasn't good for the people who were exposed to it, either. So he was an early proponent of not doing that, but, of course, nobody listened.

The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away.

Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.

One of the reasons [William] Shakespeare is so endlessly fascinating is that you can look at that figure from about 10 different angles: Caliban in Shakespeare's day was probably viewed as a sort of comic, barbarian type, but into the 19th century there were productions where Caliban was the hero. He's a potential rapist of a minor. Is that a good thing? No, it is not. On the other hand, Prospero's got him cooped up in a cave and tortures him if he doesn't do what Prospero wants. Is that a good thing? No. Shakespeare doesn't let you off easy.

I was delighted with the film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth]; it almost made me want to be a film-maker!

I don't think it's a question of whether you eat meat. It's a question of what kind of meat, and where it comes from.

Science is not something that exists apart from human beings. It's one of the things we do as human beings, and we always have done science and technology in some form.

The characters [of The Tempest] have always been favorites of mine. It is one of his meditations on art - what it does.

There are novels that end well, but in between there are human beings acting like human beings. And human beings are not perfect. All of the motives a human being may have, which are mixed, that's the novelists' materials. That's where they have to go. And a lot of that just isn't pretty. We like to think of ourselves as really, really good people. But look in the mirror. Really look. Look at your own mixed motives. And then multiply that.

I don't believe in a perfect world. I don't believe it's achievable, and I believe the people who try to achieve it usually end up turning it into something like Cambodia or something very similar because purity tests set in. Are you ideologically pure enough to be allowed to live? Well, it turns out that very few people are, so you end up with a big powerful struggle and a mass killing scene.

Under the old system - which is now so archaic that a lot of people can't remember it - if you wanted money you had to go to the bank and take the money out in cash form, and you couldn't take out money that you didn't have. But with the credit card you can spend money you don't have, and that is just so tempting.

Even in the tragedies, [William] Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools.

The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others.

We are very short on organs, and the pig solution is probably a lot better than the human clone solution - though maybe not for the pigs.

Once I was in Texas, where they had this thing called Ralph the Swimming Pig. You went into a theater and you were looking through a great big window at people dressed as mermaids swimming around with oxygen tanks. One of the mermaids had a bottle of milk, and a small Ralph the Swimming Pig dove in and swam over. Naturally, afterward, I said in the cafeteria, "What happens to the Ralphs when they get bigger? Would you serve Ralphs who have retired?" "Oh no! We would never do such a thing."

The farther north you go, the fewer fruits and vegetables there are. What kind of apple trees do you suggest the Inuit get their apples from? And how much oil is expended transporting such things out there? It's an equation.

When we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up. Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.

Science fiction went through a period that was mostly object-oriented or inventions for distant galaxies.But when we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up.

It doesn't really matter what "genre" your book is. What matters is that it's a good book of its kind. Whatever that kind may be.

I was horrified in high school by the fate of the hanged maids at the end of the Odyssey; it seemed unfair to me, even then.

It's in Macbeth: "The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon." I seldom have occasion to pull it out, but it's ready and waiting!

If we read books all the time we would be very unhealthy, as we would not get any fresh air, exercise, or contact with nature. Also we would not spend time with other people. There are a lot of plusses to reading - it's an interactive brain workout - but like everything else that's beneficial in moderation, overdoses can be dangerous.

My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.

I saw all of the films [based on The Tempest] available, including the one with Helen Mirren in which Prospero is Prospera - you wonder, "Would it work?" But it does, because anything she does works.

I meet a lot of readers who first encountered my work in school. And I can only assume there is another group who would run away very fast if they saw me coming, for exactly the same reason. Reading is individual, and not all tastes are alike.

I am too old to have ever been very worried about what "genre" any given book of mine might be. I read everything. I am easily amused.

Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way.

The film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth] opens with an Albanian blood feud and goes on to delve into, for instance, prison systems, underpaid tomato pickers, the gulf oil spill. It's all woven together in a sensuous, oblique way that's not the same as the single-message kind of documentary we're used to, with an "answer" at the end. It's more like an exploration. Sort of like what you do with Birth of a Nation.

There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.

In the animal world individuals cheat, as do we.

It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.

I'm not sure I really am a Humanist. I describe myself as a rigorous agnostic, which means that you cannot declare as a matter of material truth something that is in fact a matter of spiritual belief.

I doubt that Canada will be seen forever on the international stage as Mr/s Boring Niceperson, as has been the habit.

I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.

A lot of the stuff Kafka said he thought was hilariously funny.

Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.

The responsible treatment of this particular Ring of Power is not necessarily to toss it into the Cracks of Doom. But we have to come up with something rather quickly, or what we'll get is the Land of Mordor.

I've been involved in activities with other people who were put in jail. We were protesting the closing of the prison farm program at the prison I used in a previous book, Alias Grace. Some of us also put up money in order to save the heirloom herd of cows there. So I own half a cow!

Kafka thought his stories were hilarious. We don't necessarily have that reaction to them, but he certainly laughed his head off every time he read them out loud.

We do not know how we'd behave. But a lot of people facing fascism didn't become fascists. I don't happen to believe that we are all monsters.

Mary Baker Eddy is said to have had a phone installed in her coffin just in case she happened to wake up. I've been told that's an urban myth. Somebody should check it out.

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.