Quotes by Margaret Atwood

About Margaret Atwood:

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is 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 non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community. Among innumerable contributions to Canadian literature, she was a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Margaret Atwood

Canada was built on dead beavers.

Margaret Atwood

If you're put on a pedestal, you're supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.

Margaret Atwood

Canada is a balloon-puncturing country. You are not really allowed to be an icon unless you also make an idiot of yourself.

Margaret Atwood

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

Margaret Atwood

The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.

Margaret Atwood

We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.

Margaret Atwood

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

Margaret Atwood

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.

Margaret Atwood

Vampires get the joy of flying around and living forever, werewolves get the joy of animal spirits. But zombies, they're not rich, or aristocratic, they shuffle around. They're a group phenomenon, they're not very fast, they're quite sickly. So what'...

Margaret Atwood

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren't very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

Margaret Atwood

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television - there wasn't a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

Margaret Atwood

If I pick up a book with vampires on the cover, I want there to be vampires. If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling...

Margaret Atwood

We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we're so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivat...

Margaret Atwood

Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot... they don't know what's going to happen to them.

Margaret Atwood

I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you c...

Margaret Atwood

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.

Margaret Atwood

If it's all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it's all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that's it. You're not going to think about it much aft...

Margaret Atwood

Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.

Margaret Atwood

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...

Margaret Atwood

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

Margaret Atwood

Author Bio

  • NameMargaret Atwood
  • DescriptionCanadian writer
  • BornNovember 18, 1939
  • CountryCanada
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Novelist; Educationist
  • WorksThe Handmaid's Tale; Cat's Eye; Alias Grace; The Blind Assassin; Oryx And Crake; Surfacing
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Companion Of The Order Of Canada; Order Of Ontario; Molson Prize; Humanist Of The Year; Prince Of Asturia Literary Prize