Quotes from Margaret Atwood

There are some virtues to not saying what you think all the time.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

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.

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.

Time is not a thing that passes ... it's a sea on which you float.

Like the trains, she's never on time and always departing.

My favorite author's question of all time - because it's so simple to answer ... 'Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done?

For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.

A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.

The use of "religion" as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time.

The bell that measures time is ringing

I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.

Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

Kafka thought his stories were hilarious. We don't necessarily have that reaction to them, but he certainly laughed his head off every time he read them out loud.

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.

I was born in the Ottawa General Hospital right after the Gray Cup Football Game in 1939. Six months later, I was backpacked into the Quebec bush. I grew up in and out of the bush, in and out of Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto.

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 derivatives, because it's not going to be around forever.

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart.

And she finds it difficult to believe—that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.

Love's never a fair trade.

If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.