Margaret Atwood

“Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.”

“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...”

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

“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.”

“I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.”

“The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.”

“I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody under 40,' or 'Nobody under 25.' With my books, it always has been, and continues to be,...”

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

“I'm bad at picking heroes.”

“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...”

“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.”

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

“A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.”

“Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.”

“As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.”

“Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.”

“Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.”

“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.”

“The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.”

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