The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.
Margaret Atwood
Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
War is what happens when language fails.
An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.
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.
Heroes need monsters to establish their heroic credentials. You need something scary to overcome.
Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
A word after a word after a word is power.
Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.
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.
Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.
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?
This above all, to refuse to be a victim.
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.
Never pray for justice, because you might get some.
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.
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.
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.
People use technology only to mean digital technology. Technology is actually everything we make.
A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.
When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.
Gardening is not a rational act.
Reality simply consists of different points of view.
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.
All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.
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.
Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.
As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you're going to say, 'Where did we come from, what happens next?' The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.
I've never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are individuals. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. But that doesn't mean they're going to be that way.
Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.
Canada was built on dead beavers.
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.
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.
Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one.
Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.
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.
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
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.
The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not 'Am I really that oppressed?' but 'Am I really that boring?'
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.
You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.
