Quotes By Margaret Atwood

I'm bad at picking heroes.

I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you can read.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

War is what happens when language fails.

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.

Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.

Gardening is not a rational act.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

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

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.

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

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

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

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.

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.

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

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

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

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

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 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.

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