Quotes by Margaret Atwood
As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.
Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
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.
The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that's because I'm doing it wrong.
You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.
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.
You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.
The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
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.
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.
Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.
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.
There would be no Sherlock Holmes if it were not for serial publication.
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.
For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.
Canada was built on dead beavers.
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?
War is what happens when language fails.
'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.
Reality simply consists of different points of view.
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.
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.
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.
There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.
You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.
