Margaret Atwood Quotes

Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.

Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling.

Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Never open your story with a character thinking, I advise my students. As a further precaution, don’t put a character in a room alone – create a friend, a bystander, a genie, for God’s sake, any sentient creature with whom your main character can converse, perhaps argue or, better yet, engage in some action. If a person is out and doing, it’s more likely that something interesting might happen to her or him. Shut up in a room with only his thoughts for company well, that way lies fictional disaster.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

To me, truth is the big thing. Constantly you're writing something and you get to a place where your characters could go this way or that and I just can't lie. The characters have gotta be true to themselves.

Though it's marvelously entertaining, and I had fantastic fun writing the book, it's not terribly easily, the material, and it's not all that familiar...although we think it is familiar. The processes of the wonderful narratives are very intricate. It's about the charm - the spellbinding charm - of ingenuity, and it's not so easy to remember the plots or the structure or even the names.

I was definitely looking for a reason to impose rules in the story during the writing process... a set of reasons that you could graph for why it's not chaos and anarchy - for why it has to be order, and why you need architects and an architectural brain to create the world of the dream for the subject to enter.

Bad acting, like bad writing, has a remarkable uniformity, whether seen on the French, German, or English stages; it all seems modeled after two or three types, and those the least like types of good acting. The fault generally lies less in the bad imitation of a good model, than in the successful imitation of a bad model.

My songs aren't built around choruses or hooks or anything like that. That's kind of how I write screenplays too.

I don't think comic timing is the same as music timing, but I definitely find that I've learned from just writing in general that songs can be narrative without having a story.

Whenever I teach writing I tell them to never revise as you go. Finish the first draft. This is my writing advice. I can't do that myself. I'm lying to everybody. I write a paragraph, and then I rewrite that paragraph. I want to feel like I'm standing on firm ground before I move on to the next paragraph. Mentally, I have to do that.

There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.

In writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience.

I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened. The weight of the centuries lies on children, I'm sure of it.

It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.

The craft, the writing of a song, is about creating a story, a life story, a world within three minutes, but that's the frame, if you like, the picture frame. That fascinates me.

In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf.

Essentially, the scripts are not that different. Let's say, in literary terms, it's the difference between writing horizontally and writing vertically. In live television, you wrote much more vertically. You had to probe people because you didn't have money or sets or any of the physical dimensions that film will allow you. So you generally probed people a little bit more. Film writing is much more horizontal. You can insert anything you want: meadows, battlefields, the Taj Mahal, a cast of thousands. But essentially, writing a story is writing a story.

I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter, which is half a filmmaker... But it is not an art form, because screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.