Margaret Atwood
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.Collection: Space
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.Collection: Valentines
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.Collection: Gardening
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 movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.Collection: Poetry
I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.Collection: Knowledge
A word after a word after a word is power.Collection: Power
Gardening is not a rational act.Collection: Gardening
War is what happens when language fails.Collection: War
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.Collection: Freedom
Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.Collection: Communication
Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.Collection: Age
I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.Collection: Hope
If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it.Collection: Environmental
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.Collection: Poetry
Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.Collection: Technology
Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.Collection: Society
Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It's a question of how those tools are used by people.Collection: Science
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.
If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.
Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.
An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.
Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
Canada was built on dead beavers.
Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
'1984' is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.
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 against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.
If you're put on a pedestal, you're supposed to behave yourself like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited circumference. Not much room to move around.
Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.
The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.
This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.
There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.
We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we're so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it's not going to be around forever.
Reality simply consists of different points of view.
Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.
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?
If I pick up a book with vampires on the cover, I want there to be vampires. If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling.
As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.
Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.
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.
The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.