Margaret Atwood Quotes

Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers.

Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.

When I was about 13 or 14, I had an English teacher who made a deal with me that I could get out of doing all of the year's regular work if I would write a short story a week and on Friday read it to the class.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

I'm a nearly uncontrollable Geoff Dyer fan, who I think is one of the most comically brilliant writers today.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

Minor writers think style is all.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

My scripts, they're pretty serious. I basically just describe stuff. I don't put too many notes and letters to the editors. But when I wrote 'KGBLT,' in parentheses I wrote, 'Well this is the best thing I've ever written. It will all be downhill from here. I'm so sorry for the rest of my career.'

Working with language requires beauty for me.

There's no literary merit in my books.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.

I did study with Anne Carson briefly in Michigan. She taught there, and that's where I first encountered her, in her class.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

I get scripts and think, 'There's not enough here to get my teeth stuck into.' That's a result of studying English, where you luxuriate in these big, lush novels.

Not a word that I have written about Yugoslavia is denounceable, not a single one. It is literature.

I'm really focused and obsessed with writing things that are specific. I don't like big rock lyrics - I find them infuriating.

I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.