Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
Margaret Atwood
Top 10 Best Quotes
“There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”
“My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.”
“I had a boyfriend once who sent me--in a plastic bag, so it wouldn't drip--a real cow's heart with a real arrow stuck through it. As you may divine, he knew I was interested in poetry.”
“It's somewhat daunting to reflect that Hell is -- possibly -- the place where you are stuck in your own personal narrative for ever, and Heaven is -- possibly -- the place where you can ditch it, and take up wisdom instead.”
“What we consider real is also imagined; every life lived is also an inner life, a life created.”
“Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.”
“Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway.”
“The written word is so much like evidence — like something that can be used against you later.”
“This is perhaps why Dante chooses the poet Virgil to be his guide in the Inferno; in visiting a strange location, it's always best to go with someone who's been there before, and – most important of all on a sightseeing tour of Hell – who might also know how to get you out again.”
“There was also, as it turned out, the dismay of my parents to be reckoned with: their tolerance about caterpillars and beetles and other non-human life forms did not quite extend to artists.”
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Book Keywords:
on-writing, poetry, epigrams, fandom, disappointment, writers, similes, authors, art
