addiction

author

Canada

church

debt

divorce

eating

love

man (male)

meeting an author

mother

pain

past

popular culture

reading

science fiction

spring

storytelling

stupidity

suicide

wanting

nationality

Canadian

occupation / innovator as

novelist

poet

essayist

literary critic

pedagogue

non-fiction writer

science fiction writer

scientific organization

Royal Society of Literature

innovator in the field of

poetry

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

essay

Royal Society of Canada

is having every habit lying there in one's body even after quitting - having them lying dormant like flowers in the desert, ready to burst into full and luxuriant bloom if given the right conditions.

*Flattery is a juggler, and no kin unto sincerity.

's work is by no means an accurate reflection of the person behind it. To want to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâte.

Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.

*No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

is part of the human condition such that human civilization is based on various forms of exchange and the revenges that come when they are not paid back.

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

is like an amputation: One survives it, but there's less of you.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you. Margaret Atwood

is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and also language.

Eating is our earliest metaphor, preceding our consciousness of gender difference, race, nationality, and language. We eat before we talk.

is something like running barefoot along a street covered with broken bottles.

is a being falling into two categories: nice men do things for you, bad men do things to you.

wedding stuff

is just a woman's strategy for making other women.

is never a good idea. To want to meet an artist because you like their work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâte.

is a fabrication who is denied an existence of their own while we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

is a thing we decorate. It's a curious thing.

is the dream of society... it does not examine itself.

Popular art is the dream of society... it does not examine itself.

is a more brain-intensive activity than television, because in reading one is supplying just about everything. One is a creator.

More of your brain is involved when reading than it is when you watch television. . . because you are supplying just about everything. . . you're a creator. (Margaret Atwood)

is all about talking squids in outer space.

Women write science fiction. Women have always written science fiction. But often, they have been ignored, or sidelined, or simply slid under the radar. If they’re very good at writing science fiction, they can get co-opted out of the genre and into “literary fiction”. Take, for example, Margaret Atwood, whose work is out and-out science fiction, from The Handmaid’s Tale to Oryx and Crake. Atwood once infamously said her work wasn’t science fiction at all, because that was all about “talking squids in outer space”.

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.

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. Margaret Atwood

is both a rebuke to the living and a puzzle that defies them to solve it... and like a poem, it is finished and refuses to answer questions as to its final cause.

A suicide is both a rebuke to the living and a puzzle that defies them to solve it. Like a poem, suicide is finished and refuses to answer questions as to its final cause.

*An essayist is, essentially, writing the biography of a thought, allowing cognition itself'its circuitry and obsessiveness, its 'moments of being,' as Virginia Woolf called it'to play out on the page.

Margaret AtwoodThinkers

Margaret Atwood