Margaret Atwood Quotes

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera – or an NHL game.

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

You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.

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.

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.

The society in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.

Without the light, no chance; without the dark, no dance.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.

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

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 technology just before that or one several technologies back.

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 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, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‘reader.’

My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn’t simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.