Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic (1939- )
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
MARGARET ATWOOD
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The Blind Assassin
Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
Potential has a shelf life.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For"
It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography -- but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.
MARGARET ATWOOD
On Writing Poetry
To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Marrying the Hangman", Selected Poems
One of the things about totalitarianism is that people disappear, and you can't find out what happened to them.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Margaret Atwood Is Still Seeing the Future", The Ringer, April 27, 2017
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Alias Grace
Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Alias Grace
Malicious rumours can spread confusion. A careless remark can be as a cigarette butt casually tossed into the dumpster, smouldering until it bursts into flame and engulfs a neighborhood.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted, on the fingers of one hand.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Lady Oracle
When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me -- yet -- the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.
MARGARET ATWOOD
On Writing Poetry
Love's never a fair trade.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood