Canadian - Novelist | November 18, 1939 -
Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.
Margaret Atwood
HeartExperienceThinkYouCountry
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.
I AmPoetryWritingBelieveBetter
The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.
GoodWordsPoetryMeProblemsThink
If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it.
IntelligenceAnimalEnvironmentalLab
I didn't go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.
ShoesSchoolChildCityWoodsYear
I'm from the generation that had the boys' door and the girls' door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.
SchoolDoorGenerationYouWrong
Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.
TimeBackBordersBoxesStuffForth
You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.
I AmPeopleYouFindNothingMuch
Within one's own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.
FamilyMoneyMeasurePricePerson
Debt is part of the human condition. Civilization is based on exchanges - on gifts, trades, loans - and the revenges and insults that come when they are not paid back.
BackCivilizationDebtHumanInsults
Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.
WritingWhoOwesOurSomeAbout
I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television - there wasn't a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.
ChildhoodWritingReadingDrawingUs
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