Quotes by Margaret Atwood
The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.
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'.
Social media is called social media for a reason. It lends itself to sharing rather than horn-tooting.
The 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.
Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.
Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
You could tell 'The Handmaid's Tale' from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.
I'm bad at picking heroes.
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.
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.
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?
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.
A word after a word after a word is power.
An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.
Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
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.
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.
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.
Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.
I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
