Top 893 Quotes & Sayings by Margaret Atwood - Page 2

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.

I'm the only person you've ever met who has read Longfellow.

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

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

The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.

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.

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

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

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.

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

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.

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

If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You're not going to read that book again.

If I pick up a book with vampires on the cover, I want there to be vampires. If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

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

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

We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we're so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it's not going to be around forever.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.

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.

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.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

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

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

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

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.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance.

I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that - you can have it just the next minute; you can press the button and just have it.

I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you can read.

I'm bad at picking heroes.

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.

If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.

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.

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

If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it.

I didn't go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

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 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.

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don't want to open up my cornflakes and find that they're full of pebbles... You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn't.

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

I'm from the generation that had the boys' door and the girls' door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

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

I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.