I did … learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it’s about your friends, a plot element if it’s about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it’s about John Keats.
MARGARET ATWOODI did … learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it’s about your friends, a plot element if it’s about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it’s about John Keats.
MARGARET ATWOODHunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
MARGARET ATWOODwe lived in the gaps between the stories
MARGARET ATWOODFarewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence.
MARGARET ATWOODI walk away from him. It’s enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It’s like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.
MARGARET ATWOODToo much God and you overdose. God needs to be filtered.
MARGARET ATWOODThe biggest debt is always the government debt; it’s always debt that government has run up on your behalf.
MARGARET ATWOODIn the end, we’ll all become stories.
MARGARET ATWOODIt’s evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.
MARGARET ATWOODMaybe that’s what love is, I thought: it’s being pissed off.
MARGARET ATWOODConfronted by too much emptiness … the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
MARGARET ATWOODImmortality,’ said Crake, ‘ is a concept. If you take ‘mortality’ as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then ‘immortality’ is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you’ll be.
MARGARET ATWOODI don’t think of poetry as a ‘rational’ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.
MARGARET ATWOODI’m a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don’t like multitasking. When I’m doing one thing, I like to do just that thing.
MARGARET ATWOODThere is no fool like an educated fool.
MARGARET ATWOODVictorian literature was my subject at Harvard.
MARGARET ATWOOD