Margaret Atwood

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.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

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.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

I'm a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don't like multitasking. When I'm doing one thing, I like to do just that thing.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.

And she finds it difficult to believe—that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.

The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had.

Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.

There's blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

Every aspect of human technology has a dark side, including the bow and arrow.

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.