Quotes from Margaret Atwood

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.

Pearls are congealed oyster spit.

There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain ... Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.

If social stability goes pear-shaped, you have a choice between anarchy and dictatorship. Most people will opt for more security, even if they have to give up some personal freedom.

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

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

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 can read.

A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.

When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

Why do men feel threatened by women?

If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.

But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.

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

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.

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

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.

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.

Every utopia - let's just stick with the literary ones - faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don't fit in?

I would not change [my past work] anymore than I would airbrush a photo of myself.

The darkness is really out there. It's not something that's in my head, just. It's in my work because it's in the world.