Quotes from Margaret Atwood

There's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn't see why they would want to skin a cat even one way.

It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I ... want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.

Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win.

My parents were gardeners themselves, and perforce they used environmental techniques because it was during the war, and you didn't have the new sorts of chemicals.

Surviving Is the only war we can afford.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.

How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.

There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain ... Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

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.

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.