Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, CC OOnt FRSCis a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award several times, winning twice. In 2001, she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. She is also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth18 November 1939
CityOttawa, Canada
CountryCanada
The fact is that blank pages inspire me with terror. What will I put on them? Will it be good enough? Will I have to throw it out?
When I finally went to school I had to adjust to other girls and learn their fiendish ways. Having learnt them, I turned them on all and sundry.
Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.
Anaesthesia, that's one technique: if it hurts, invent a different pain.
Blank pages inspire me with terror.
I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.
The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.
I tend to feel if people say they're going to do something, they will, if given the chance.
But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.
But I keep going on with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance, if I meet you or if you escape, in the future or in heaven or in prison or underground, some other place. What they have in common is that they're not here. By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.
No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.
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.
It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you're telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.