Margaret Atwood Quotes

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

You hope that people read your book and say "Yes, this is the way it is or could be." But then you have no way of knowing until the reader reads the book. Actually, the critical response doesn't worry me. I've had very few reviews that have upset me.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

In Sea affairs, nothing is impossible, and nothing is improbable.

Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.

A book of mine is always a matter of fate. There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course.

Life isn't a book. There's no guarantee of a happy ending.

I hate to keep repeating my mantra, but, boy, there are things happening that we did not expect to happen in any way, shape, manner, or form.

Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.

Human minds are more full of mysteries than any written book and more changeable than the cloud shapes in the air.

What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.

Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?

You have to go where the book leads you.

Might she have loved me? just as well She might have hated, who can tell!

Something must be left to chance; nothing is certain in a sea fight

I assumed just from being around, all these years, that people would immediately glom on to, Well, it's a departure, and it's a dystopian kind of thing, and that's natural, of course. But it's surprised me - not even surprised me, but it's pleased me - how much people have been responding to the way the book was written.

You go into a book and you're in the dark, really. You go in with a certain fear and trembling. You know one thing. You know you will not be the same person when this voyage is over. But you don't know what's going to happen to you between getting on the boat and stepping off.

Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.

The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.

Writing a book is an adventure.

I never write with any kind of message, and I don't think that this book, 'Goodbye, Stranger' has a message in the capital M form of the word but I do hope it makes people ask themselves questions about what they think.

If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.

I was kind of relieved with the way the book [The Proud Highway] came out. It's beyond an autobiography or a biography. I never knew what was going to come up next.

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.