Margaret Atwood Quotes

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

“I don’t know whether there are any really pretty novels. All of the motives a human being may have, which are mixed, that’s the novelists’ material.

We like to think of ourselves as really, really good people. But look in the mirror. Really look. Look at your own mixed motives. And then multiply that.”

“I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.”

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

“If you’re put on a pedestal you’re supposed to behave like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.”

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

“Men often ask me, 'Why are your female characters so paranoid?' It’s not paranoia. It’s recognition of their situation.”

“Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.”

“Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say, ‘It can’t happen here.’ Anything can happen anywhere, given the right circumstances.”

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

“People cry at weddings for the same reason they cry at happy endings: because they so desperately want to believe in something they know is not credible.”

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”

“The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.”

“War is what happens when language fails.”

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

“When I was young I believed that non-fiction meant true. But you read a history written in, say, 1920 and a history of the same events written in 1995 and they’re very different.

There may not be one Truth — there may be several truths — but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t exist.”

“You know the myth: Everybody had to fit into Procrustes’ bed and if they didn’t, he either stretched them or cut off their feet. I’m not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain point of view.”