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. – Margaret Atwood
The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world. – Margaret Atwood
Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now. – Margaret Atwood
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? – Margaret Atwood
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. – 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. – Margaret Atwood
The threat to the planet is us. It’s actually not a threat to the planet – it’s a threat to us. – Margaret Atwood
I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw. – Margaret Atwood
You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense. – Margaret Atwood
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. – Margaret Atwood
I’m a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don’t like multitasking. When I’m doing one thing, I like to do just that thing. – Margaret Atwood
Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see. – Margaret Atwood
The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. – Margaret Atwood
Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges – on gifts, trades, loans – and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back. – Margaret Atwood
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. – Margaret Atwood
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized. – Margaret Atwood
I particularly like Twitter, because it’s short and can be very funny and informative. It’s a little bit like having your own radio program. – Margaret Atwood
The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not ‘Am I really that oppressed?’ but ‘Am I really that boring?’ – Margaret Atwood
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. – Margaret Atwood
We shouldn’t be saying ‘Save the planet’; we should be saying: ‘Save viable conditions in which people can live.’ That’s what we’re dealing with here. – Margaret Atwood