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 ATWOODI’m bad at picking heroes.
MARGARET ATWOODThe 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.
MARGARET ATWOODCanada was built on dead beavers.
MARGARET ATWOODStick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there’d be no stories.
MARGARET ATWOODA lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
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 ATWOODShow me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
MARGARET ATWOODAlthough from you I far must roam, do not be broken hearted. We two, who in the souls are one, are never truly parted.
MARGARET ATWOODThe best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
MARGARET ATWOODThe heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.
MARGARET ATWOODI read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.
MARGARET ATWOODI would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
MARGARET ATWOODOnce upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
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 ATWOODAnd yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
MARGARET ATWOOD