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
I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.
Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.
Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.
If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.
Canada was built on dead beavers.
Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.
Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.
Sons branch out, but one woman leads to another.
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.
The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story.
Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. All of them? Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.