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
When we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up. Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.
I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin.
Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women.
Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.
Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.
Writing poetry is a state of free float.
Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.
There are some virtues to not saying what you think all the time.
I would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.
The truly fearless think of themselves as normal.
In the end, we'll all become stories.
So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.
I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.