Quotes from Margaret Atwood

Florida's not the hick town you keep saying it is," says Reynolds. "Times have changed; they've got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it!

Here is what I'd like to tell. I'd like to tell a story about how Moira escaped, for good this time. Or if I couldn't tell that, I'd like to say she blew up Jezebel's, with fifty Commanders inside it. I'd like her to end with something daring and spectacular, some outrage, something that would befit her. But as far as I know that didn't happen. I don't know how she ended, or even if she did, because I never saw her again.

That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland. This

God isn't what they say," she said. She said you could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both.

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first.

Canada is built on dead beavers.

They were reducing us to animals—to penned-up animals—to our animal nature. They were rubbing our noses in that nature. We were to consider ourselves subhuman.

I believe in effort, but not in unnecessary effort: Aunt Vidala was most likely negotiating her exit from this world all on her own.

In this world you have to take your bits and ends of kindness where you can find them, as they do not grow on trees.

Placidity and order and everything in its place, with a decorous and sanctioned violence going on underneath everything, like a heavy, brutal shoe tapping out the rhythm on a carpeted floor.

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.