Margaret Atwood Quotes

I think good entertainment makes you feel something... it can be a variety of different feelings.

I think the last thing you want to do as a writer, as a storyteller, is to create indifference. I don't necessarily go out of my way to provoke, but I would much rather have a song that triggers a whole myriad of reactions than a song that inspires a shrug of the shoulder.

I'm not very much of a reader really, because I find much of it very bad, very uninteresting, very speculative.

I wish something on T.V. would trouble me. Then maybe I would watch it.

I remember reading 'The Guest' and thinking, 'This is going to be something!'

When people are telling stories on screen, you can show the reactions of people, play it off those reactions, and it can be fun. But when it's someone just giving an opinion on things, even if the opinion is kind of interesting, that is potentially deadly. It has to be really quick.

When I make a film, the yardstick is my mind. If I laugh at the jokes and feel sad at the serious undersides, then the subject works.

If a film can't excite me and teach me something about life, then it is not worth pursuing.

Whatever films I make, the mandate is that it should touch the audiences and engage them from the first scene.

I don't think it's right to define films as commercial or art house. What's important is that a film evokes a certain emotion when it's being watched.

In this mob of I's inside, which one is me? Hear me out. I know I'm wandering, but don't start putting a lid on this racket. No telling what I'll do then. Every moment I'm thrown by your story. One moment it's happy, and I'm singing. One moment it's sad, and I'm weeping. It turns bitter, and I pull away. But then you spill a little grace, and just like that, I'm all light. It's not so bad, this arrangement, actually.

Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.

Scott Fitzgerald is a sound you like to hear at certain times of the day, say at four in the afternoon and again late at night, and at other times it makes you slightly sick.

The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.

Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement.

'Thou shalt not' might reach the head, but it takes 'Once upon a time' to reach the heart.

If a script has that affect on me during a reading, then it is definitely a film I want to be part of.

I don't know how much movies should entertain. To me I'm always interested in movies that scar. The thing I love about JAWS is that I've never gone swimming in the ocean again.

That's how a good story works. It changes how you feel. It brings you to a greater appreciation, a greater joy, of your own existence.

I love when a TV show, or entertainment in general, makes me feel something; be it positive, be it negative, be it happiness, be it awkward, uncomfortable if it can make me feel, it's done it's job.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

For one who is having no personal experience, the passionate disquiet of others is at any rate a titillation of the nerves, like seeing a play or listening to music.

I love what movies and television and all that kind of stuff has done to me through the years. I love that it can bring up all these different emotions in me - whether it's anger or happiness or sadness...whatever it may be.

The direct effect on our mind is achieved by the words, the text, the thought, which arouse consideration. Our will is directly affected by the super-objective, by other objectives, by a through line of action. Our feelings are directly worked upon by tempo-rhythm.

I don't really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.