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I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.

Margaret Atwood

I’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 ATWOOD

Distract Multitasking Whim
Maybe that’s what love is, I thought: it’s being pissed off.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Emotion Love Piss
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 ATWOOD

Character Gossip School
Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Anxiety Book Character
I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Grow Survival Wood
There is no fool like an educated fool.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Educated Emotional Fool People
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.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Fight Racism Write
And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Hurt Intention Need Someone
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Fiction Planet Space
A 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 ATWOOD

Dignity Ignorance Poetry
Canada was built on dead beavers.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Beaver Built Country People
Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
MARGARET ATWOOD

Handmaid Need Tale Waste
The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Bears Close Kind Way
I’m bad at picking heroes.
MARGARET ATWOOD

Bad Hero Pick Theory
I 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 ATWOOD

Important Sound Think
Stick 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 ATWOOD

Good Light Stick Stories

I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.

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I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.

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Popular Authors

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