Margaret Atwood

“I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.”

“Gardening is not a rational act.”

“I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.”

“The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.”

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

“Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee... I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.”

“I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.”

“If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.”

“If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don't want to open up my cornflakes and find that they're full of pebbles... You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn't.”

“Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.”

“Popular art is the dream of society it does not examine itself.”

“War is what happens when language fails.”