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
There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.
When they came to harvest my corpse (open your mouth, close your eyes) cut my body from the rope, surprise, surprise: I was still alive. Tough luck, folks, I know the law: you can't execute me twice for the same thing. How nice. I fell to the clover, breathed it in, and bared my teeth at them in a filthy grin. You can imagine how that went over. Now I only need to look out at them through my sky-blue eyes. They see their own ill will staring then in the forehead and turn tail Before, I was not a witch. But now I am one.
I think the main thing is: Just do it. Plunge in! Being Canadian, I go swimming in icy cold lakes, and there is always that dithering moment. "Am I really going to do this? Won't it hurt?" And at some point you just have to flop in there and scream. Once you're in, keep going. You may have to crumple and toss, but we all do that. Courage! I think that is what's most required.
This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.
When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.
When we're young, we like happy endings. When we're a little older, we think happy endings are unrealistic and so we prefer bad but credible endings. When we're older still, we realize happy endings aren't so bad after all.
I marvel again at the nakedness of men's lives: the showers right out in the open, the body exposed for inspection and comparison, the public display of privates. What is it for? What purposes of reassurance does it serve? The flashing of a badge, look, everyone, all is in order, I belong here. Why don't women have to prove to one another that they are women? Some form of unbuttoning, some split-crotch routine, just as casual. A doglike sniffing.
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.
It made him feel invisible—not that he wanted to feel anything else.
Every novel is-at the beginning-the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.
All writers must go from now to once a upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past.
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.