Author Profile
Margaret Atwood
1939 • Canadian • Novelist
76
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 76 quotesOptimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.— Margaret Atwood
I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.— Margaret Atwood
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.— Margaret Atwood
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.— Margaret Atwood
I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.— Margaret Atwood
The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.— Margaret Atwood
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.— 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
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.— Margaret Atwood
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.— Margaret Atwood
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.'— Margaret Atwood
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.— Margaret Atwood