Margaret Atwood

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.

I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim.

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.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

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.

If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.

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.

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

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

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody under 40,' or 'Nobody under 25.' With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is 'reader.'

I'm from the generation that had the boys' door and the girls' door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

Religions in general have to rediscover their roots. In Hinduism and the Koran, animals are described as equals. If you walk into a cathedral and look at the decorations of early Christianity, there are vines, animals, creatures and birds thriving all over the stonework.

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

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.