Margaret Atwood Quotes

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‘race’ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that ‘Oryx and Crake’ is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it’s neutral.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn’t write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn’t simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.

Within one’s own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.