Margaret Atwood Writing Quotations

Don't wait until you're 'in the mood.' Get into the mood by writing.

Make the verses flow together. If a following verse has nothing to do with the previous, you may lose our listener/reader. You want a smooth flow to hear or read, and it's easier to memorize.

It had helped to keep her sane, that writing. Then, when time had begun again and real people had entered it, she'd abandoned it here. Now it's a whisper from the past. Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice?

Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.

If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.

The short answer to 'Why do you write' is - I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life; to go places I haven't been; to examine life on earth; to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible; to be surprised.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

A non-event ... is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means.

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.

After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing; and through them, and some of my teachers, I discovered that there was a whole subterranean Wonderland of Canadian writing that was going on just out of general earshot and sight.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

Writing... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television - there wasn't a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when I didn't write. I started again at 16 and have no idea why, but it was suddenly the only thing I wanted to do.

Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.

You always think, 'Oh, if only I had a little chalet in the mountains! How great that would be and I'd do all this writing' Except, no, I wouldn't. I'd do the same amount of writing I do now and the rest of the time I'd go stir crazy. If you're waiting for the perfect moment you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.

I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time.

Blank pages inspire me with terror.

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.

Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody's going to like it. How optimistic is that?

Write down the thoughts and even more, write down a specific line. If you don't, it'll fly away forever.

Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.

Things musicals taught me: All your problems will go away if you sing about it.

You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain.

The reader cannot see into your heart. He will know only what you tell him. Make the blind see your words. Make the hard-hearted feel. Make the deaf hear.

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn't as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor - people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always - or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumor, and rumors are hard to pin down.

I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.

Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering.

I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.

While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.

­Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.

I wish you good writing and good luck. Even if you've already done the good writing, you'll still need the good luck. It's a shark-filled lagoon out there. Cross your fingers and watch your back.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

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.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.

Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.

It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.

My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.

In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught "creative writing." We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.