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 fi...”

“We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.”

“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 pheno...”

“If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.”

“Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.”

“I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the moveme...”

“Canada was built on dead beavers.”

“Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.”

“You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that hasn't come out yet. And any form of journalism you're involved with is going to be up aga...”

“I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.”

“I think every age lives in a blend of technology so there's always older ones mixed in with newer ones, and when the new technology goes down, the immediate fallback position is either that...”

“An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.”

“I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that - you can have it just the next minu...”

“If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.”

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

“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 thi...”

“Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Viet...”

“The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'”

“Religions in general have to rediscover their roots. In Hinduism and the Koran, animals are described as equals. If you walk into a cathedral and look at the decorations of early Christianit...”

“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.”