Margaret Atwood's Quotes

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

Reading 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.

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.

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

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

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

I'm bad at picking heroes.

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

If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.

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

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

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

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

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

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

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

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

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

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

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

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