Margaret Atwood

I am not running for mayor yet. But if it comes to be true that people cannot voice an opinion unless they have been elected, then we are no longer in a democracy.

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.

Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.

My good intentions are completely lethal.

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

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.

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

Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.

I felt white, drained of blood, cared for, purified. Peaceful.

There are some virtues to not saying what you think all the time.

Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Though as he'd say, what is 'belief' but a willingness to suspend the negatives?

There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

Lose your temper and you lose the fight.

I’m not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

[My favorite word is] and. It is so hopeful.

... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

So Crake never remembered his dreams. It's Snowman that remembers them instead. Worse than remembers: he's immersed in them, he'd wading through them, he's stuck in them. Every moment he's lived in the past few months was dreamed first by Crake. No wonder Crake screamed so much.

I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.