Canadian novelist, poet, and literary critic (1939- )
One of the things about totalitarianism is that people disappear, and you can't find out what happened to them.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Margaret Atwood Is Still Seeing the Future", The Ringer, April 27, 2017
To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Marrying the Hangman", Selected Poems
Confronted by too much emptiness ... the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
What is needed for really good tyranny is an unquestionable idea or authority. Political disagreement is political disagreement. But political disagreement with a theocracy is heresy.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent
When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me -- yet -- the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.
MARGARET ATWOOD
On Writing Poetry
I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Backdrop addresses cowboy"
I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Alias Grace
The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography -- but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.
MARGARET ATWOOD
On Writing Poetry
Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted, on the fingers of one hand.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid's Tale
Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For"
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
Malicious rumours can spread confusion. A careless remark can be as a cigarette butt casually tossed into the dumpster, smouldering until it bursts into flame and engulfs a neighborhood.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Alias Grace
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too--leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin