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
Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling.
Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.
I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.
Each form has its pluses and its minuses.
You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.
And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.
Mary Baker Eddy is said to have had a phone installed in her coffin just in case she happened to wake up. I've been told that's an urban myth. Somebody should check it out.
The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.
If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.
God is not the voice in the whirlwind, God is the whirlwind.
Screw poetry, it’s you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.