Quotes By Margaret Atwood

I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

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.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.

If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don't want to open up my cornflakes and find that they're full of pebbles... You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn't.

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.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.

We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

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.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim.