Margaret Atwood

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 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.

There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.

The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong.

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

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

Who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain larks you, but too deep to see.

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.

People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.

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

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.

Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.

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

The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

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.

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.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

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

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

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.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

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?

A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.

Potential has a shelf life.

The only sure camouflage was unpredictability.

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.

Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money narrative or story and religious belief intersect often with explosive force.

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.

It isnt running away theyre afraid of. We wouldnt get far. Its those other escapes the ones you can open in yourself given a cutting edge.

Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.

Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.

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.

The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner.

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

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

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.

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.

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

This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year's threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath.

The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

In the end, we’ll all become stories.

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

If someone wants to suck your toes those toes should be worth sucking.

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

Fear has a smell, as love does.

Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.

Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges on gifts trades loans and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

Theres something to be said for hunger at least it lets you know youre still alive.

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

It's crowded, which pleases me. Salesladies intimidate me, I don't like to be caught shopping.

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 with the biologists. I know how they think.

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

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

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

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?

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.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

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

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.

Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?

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.

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.

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

Paper isn't important. It's the words on them that are important.

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.

A divorce is like an amputation You survive it but theres less of you.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Modesty is invisibility. Never forget it. To be seen to be seen is to be penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.

Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

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

A divorce is like an amputation you survive it but theres less of you.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn't write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

Walking into the crowd was like sinking into a stew you became an ingredient you took on a certain flavour.

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.

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.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

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

All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.

Where theres a doctor its always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close and in that way they are like ravens or crows.

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

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.

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'.

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.

If you're put on a pedestal, you're supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.

I would rather dance as a ballerina though faultily than as a flawless clown.