Margaret Atwood Quotes

I don't have a great respect for reality or getting the 'facts' as a means of putting together a story.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

The fiction writer in me likes gaps in stories because I can jump into that gap and try to suggest something.

I'm the sort of writer who likes to leave doors open for readers.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

you can make mean anything.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

I'm very interested in the question of how we perceive something, how consciousness goes from one thing, like looking at you in your black hat to what it might mean to my imagination and how I would draw that or write that, how I would subjectify you? It's something that is endlessly interesting to me.

When I start writing a new imaginary future, I have no idea what it is. The characters arrive first. They help me figure out where they are living and I get to fill in the gaps with that and where we are. So when I get to the end of the process of composition, if I feel that I have really done my job, I have no idea what I've got - and I then spend essentially the rest of my life figuring out what it might mean.

What did you put in the fire?" Kaladin said. "To make that special smoke?" "Nothing. It was just and ordinary fire." "But, I saw-" "What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind." "What does the story mean, then?" "It means what you want it to mean," Hoid said. "The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think , but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.

I don't want to tell what the songs are about for me, because then people can't decide for themselves, which is why I write; it's for you to find your own meaning in. For me it's my story, for someone else it's theirs; if I tell exactly what it means, then it's only my story.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.

Does it mean this, does it mean that, that's all anybody wants to know. I'd say what any decent poet would say if anyone dared ask him to analyze his work: if you see it, darling, then it's there!

I like delivering a message, but what I find interesting is providing those details in a different context. Then the readers can make up their minds what it means.

Stories are a different kind of true.

Until you decide what something means, it has no meaning at all. You determine what something means.