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.
Margaret AtwoodI 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.
Margaret AtwoodThe 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.
Margaret AtwoodAnything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn't kill birds and fish they would have killed us. The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing the deer, that is Christ also. And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life. Canned Spam, canned Jesus, even the plants must be Christ.
Margaret AtwoodI have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.
Margaret AtwoodThe way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
Margaret AtwoodKnowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
Margaret AtwoodI 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.
Margaret AtwoodThe act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.
Margaret AtwoodSo Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much.
Margaret AtwoodWalking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.
Margaret AtwoodWe pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving only the leathery brownish yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow.
Margaret AtwoodWe still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
Margaret AtwoodReading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
Margaret AtwoodNeither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.
Margaret AtwoodI always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me.
Margaret AtwoodFatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.
Margaret AtwoodIf 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.
Margaret AtwoodA home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.
Margaret AtwoodIn 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.
Margaret AtwoodThey seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.
Margaret AtwoodThe Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
Margaret AtwoodI would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
Margaret AtwoodI have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife… as if I’m lacking manual skills or teeth. I have both, however. That’s why I’m not allowed a knife.
Margaret AtwoodThere are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain ... Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.
Margaret AtwoodYounger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot... they don't know what's going to happen to them.
Margaret AtwoodIt isn't chic for women to be drunk. Men drunks are more excusable, more easily absolved, but why? It must be thought they have better reasons.
Margaret AtwoodThe genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.
Margaret AtwoodNo more photos. Surely there are enough. No more shadows of myself thrown by light onto pieces of paper, onto squares of plastic. No more of my eyes, mouths, noses, moods, bad angles. No more yawns, teeth, wrinkles. I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would have allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I'm watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves. Turn the page: you, looking, are newly confused. You know me too well to know me. Or not too well: too much.
Margaret AtwoodIt's a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you're prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.
Margaret AtwoodSo that’s what art is, for the artist,” said Crake. “An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.
Margaret AtwoodAs an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist. I don't mean there's never any overlap. You learn things in one area and bring them into another area. But giving a speech against racism is not the same as writing a novel. 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. Reality simply consists of different points of view.
Margaret AtwoodTime folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.
Margaret AtwoodI 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.
Margaret AtwoodA truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret AtwoodIt's a critical fallacy of our times ... that a writer should 'grow,' 'change,' or 'develop.' This fallacy causes us to expect from children or radishes: 'grow,' or there's something wrong with you. But writers are not radishes. If you look at what most writers actually do, it resembles a theme with variations more than it does the popular notion of growth.
Margaret Atwood