Margaret Atwood Quotes

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

Life is not black and white when it comes to perception.

When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.

In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

The color of truth is gray.

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

The performances I enjoy are the ones that are hard to read or ambiguous or left-of-centre because it makes you look closer and that's what humans are like - quite mysterious creatures, hard to pinpoint.

Beauty does not mean one thing but not something else.

The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

The reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.

For nothing was simply one thing.

We're so quick to go to make things black and white, and to put things in their box. But everything is this mixture - and that's what this world is - is this blend of different things.

In one sentence, I'd describe myself as indescribable. But, I wouldn't end it with a period. I'd end it with three dots.

Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.

I am not struck so much by the diversity of testimony as by the many-sidedness of truth.

I generally don't think most situations can be labeled as black or white.

America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.

I try not to interpret things of the world into a single meaning. Rather, I try the opposite.