It turns out the woman behind such eerily prescient novels
as The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake is
just as wise as her tales are haunting. Here are 15 of author, activist,
and Twitter enthusiast Margaret
Atwood’s most profound quips.
1. On her personal philosophy
“Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means
worse than reality. I’m a realist."
— From a 2004 interview with The
Guardian
2. On the reality of being female
“Men often ask me, Why are your female characters so
paranoid? It’s not paranoia. It’s recognition of their situation.”
— From a 1990 interview with The
Paris Review
3. On limiting how her politics influence her characters
“You know the myth: Everybody had to fit into Procrustes’
bed and if they didn’t, he either stretched them or cut off their feet. I’m not
interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make
them fit my certain point of view.”
— From a 1997 interview with Mother Jones
4. On so-called “pretty” works of literature
“I don’t know whether there are any really pretty novels …
All of the motives a human being may have, which are mixed, that’s the
novelists’ material. … We like to think of ourselves as really, really good
people. But look in the mirror. Really look. Look at your own mixed motives.
And then multiply that.”
— From a 2010 interview with The
Progressive
5. On the artist’s relationship with her fans
“The artist doesn’t necessarily communicate. The artist
evokes … [It] actually doesn’t matter what I feel. What matters is how the art
makes you feel.”
— From a 2004 interview with The
Guardian
6. On the challenges of writing non-fiction
“When I was young I believed that ‘nonfiction’ meant ‘true.’
But you read a history written in, say, 1920 and a history of the same events
written in 1995 and they’re very different. There may not be one Truth—there
may be several truths—but saying that is not to say that reality doesn’t
exist.”
— From a 1997 interview with Mother Jones
7. On poetry
“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.”
— From a 1990 interview with The
Paris Review
8. On being labeled an icon
“All these things set a standard of behavior that you don’t
necessarily wish to live up to. If you’re put on a pedestal you’re supposed to
behave like a pedestal type of person. Pedestals actually have a limited
circumference. Not much room to move around.”
— From a 2013 interview with The
Telegraph
9. On how we’re all born writers
“[Everyone] ‘writes’ in a way; that is, each person has a
‘story’—a personal narrative—which is constantly being replayed, revised, taken
apart and put together again. The significant points in this narrative change
as a person ages—what may have been tragedy at 20 is seen as comedy or
nostalgia at 40.”
— From a 1990 interview with The
Paris Review
10. On the oppression at the center of her dystopian
novel, The Handmaid's Tale
“Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say, ‘It
can’t happen here.’ Anything can happen anywhere, given the right
circumstances.”
— From a 2015 lecture to
West Point cadets
11. On the discord between men and women
“‘Why do men feel threatened by women?’ I asked a male
friend of mine. … ‘They’re afraid women will laugh at them,’ he said. ‘Undercut
their world view.’ … Then I asked some women students in a poetry seminar I was
giving, ‘Why do women feel threatened by men?’ ‘They’re afraid of being
killed,’ they said.”
— From Atwood’s Second
Words: Selected Critical Prose, 1960-1982
12. On the challenges of expressing oneself
“All writers feel struck by the limitations of language. All
serious writers.”
— From a 1990 interview with The
Paris Review
13. On selfies
“I say they should enjoy it while they can. You’ll be happy
later to have taken pictures of yourself when you looked good. It’s human
nature. And it does no good to puritanically say, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be doing
that,’ because people do.”
— From a 2013 interview with The
Telegraph
14. On the value of popular kids' series (à la Harry
Potter and Percy Jackson)
"It put a lot of kids onto reading; it made reading
cool. I’m sure a lot of later adult book clubs came out of that experience. Let
people begin where they are rather than pretending that they’re something else,
or feeling that they should be something else."
— From a 2014 interview with The
Huffington Post
15. On why even the bleakest post-apocalyptic novels are,
deep down, full of hope
“Any novel is hopeful in that it presupposes a reader. It
is, actually, a hopeful act just to write anything, really, because you’re
assuming that someone will be around to [read] it.”
— From a 2011 interview with The
Atlantic
http://mentalfloss.com/article/66083/15-powerful-quotes-margaret-atwood
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