Margaret Atwood Quotes


The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But 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.


Citations

Atwood, Margaret. "The Art of Fiction No. 121." Interview by Mary Morris. The Paris Review, no. 117, Winter 1990.

Related Quotes

At the time Salisbury was conflating race and development so this seemed like a valid observation. However, as other nations developed, some have developed thriving democracies who are not primarily White Teutonics. India is the largest democracy in the world. Turkey is of mixed racial heritage. Singapore is Chinese and Malay. Japan has few whites. And South Korea is another Asian example.


President Ford forced him to resign. He had been a holdover from the Nixon Administration. Ford did not chooses him. Nixon appointed him on the advice of the ultra conservatives in the party who liked the fact that he wanted to dismantle many of the FDR New Deal policies. However, he came from Indiana which was the lost racist of all the Northern States. In the 1920s Indiana had the largest membership in the KKK of any state in the Union, and Butz came from this line of racists. He also was convicted for Federal Tax Evasion.


This quotation illustrates how extensive and virulent anti-Asian racism had become. Gompers was a left wing liberal, but also a labor leader, and the prospect of millions of oriental immigrants competing for the existing American jobs was frightening. The irony of this quotation was that most of the labor constituency that Gompers represented had been immigrants or were the children of immigrants who earlier had frightened American workers and whose ethnicity had been opposed—Irish, Italians, Jews.


Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood
  • Born: November 18, 1939
  • Nationality: Canadian
  • Profession: Novelist

Margaret Eleanor Atwood CC OOnt CH FRSC is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and two graphic novels, as well as a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including the Booker Prize (twice), Arthur C. Clarke Award, Governor General's Award, Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.