Margaret Atwood Quotes

It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning names.

Gossip, or, as we gossips like to say, character analysis.

I love, first of all, reading and discovering what the common perception is and then trying to figure out... well, how does your life cross over into that character, or what's an angle on this that might challenge the status quo? It's just a great journey as well as an education. You're constantly being educated - it's like I'm back at school and making up for lost time.

I research the role, and if it's a literary character, I read the book, and if it's an historical figure, I research documents and biographies. If it's a fictional character, I work off the script.

People are very curious and have written a lot of things about me. Right or not. I never comment on those things, because it's not much of my thing to comment on everything that's written about me.

In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.

When I finished graduate school, the first George Bush was president, and I really wanted to get out of the country. We'd just gone through the first Gulf War.

In "Faithful," Ray Bradbury is discussed a lot. The characters read "The Illustrated Man."

I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention.

The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises it is flat. Flat characters ... in their purest form ... are constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one factor to them, we get the beginning of the curve toward the round. The really flat character can be experessed in one sentence such as, "I will never desert Mr Micawber." There is Mrs Micawber - she says she won't desert Mr Micawber; she doesn't, and there she is.

I do want to write about social/cultural/historical context. I'm interested in relationships, in character, but within a specific social context. Which is kind of a political thing, I admit that. But it's what I'm interested in, and it's how I believe human behavior is legible.

[T]he judicious reader ought to know what the chief character in any work of the imagination will naturally perform, according to the situation he is thrown into, as well as doth the author himself.

I had lived in France before graduate school, but because of Spain, I had a lot of the characters go and spend a good bit of time in Spain.

Fiction is a place where people can meet, where they take the time to very seriously examine and think about the experiences of other people and about the sorts of moral decisions those characters are making.

I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.

In a book you can really talk about ideas and themes and characters in a deeper way than you can even on the screen.

RUMOR, n. A favorite weapon of the assassins of character.

What do you have in mind after you graduate?" What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. "I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.

Whoever would understand the character of Washington, in all its compass and grandeur, must learn it from his own writings, and from a complete history of his country during the long period in which he was the most prominent actor.

History thus becomes largely a study of character. Insight into temperament is hardly less important than the probing of "original materials."

The librarian, the warrior, the free spirit... archetypes are a great jumping off point to help clarify where we want to go with a character.

I think sometimes it's sort of easier to be playing a role based on a real person because there's quite often a lot more information, you're not making it up, it's there in books, it's there in research form. But really the questions you ask about the character, and why people behave, and where they come, and how they've ended up in the places they've ended up are the same.

I don't like words coming out of a character's mouth that I adore because not only is he a little bit duplicitous but he's kind of practical in the way he thinks, and he thinks in terms of everyone's humanity and how quickly we can go against what we think we meant when we said it or what we believe or blah, blah, blah.

There are a set of malicious, prating, prudent gossips, both male and female, who murder characters to kill time; and will rob a young fellow of his good name before he has years to know the value of it.

In the case of complex personalities the matter stands thus: one of these can understand other men better than they can understand themselves, because within himself he has not only the character he is grasping, but also its opposite. Duality is necessary for observation and comprehension.