Negotiating with the Dead Quotes

“There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”
― Margaret Atwood , Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“I had a boyfriend once who sent me--in a plastic bag, so it wouldn't drip--a real cow's heart with a real arrow stuck through it. As you may divine, he knew I was interested in poetry.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“It's somewhat daunting to reflect that Hell is -- possibly -- the place where you are stuck in your own personal narrative for ever, and Heaven is -- possibly -- the place where you can ditch it, and take up wisdom instead.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“What we consider real is also imagined; every life lived is also an inner life, a life created.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“The written word is so much like evidence — like something that can be used against you later.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“This is perhaps why Dante chooses the poet Virgil to be his guide in the Inferno; in visiting a strange location, it's always best to go with someone who's been there before, and – most important of all on a sightseeing tour of Hell – who might also know how to get you out again.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“There was also, as it turned out, the dismay of my parents to be reckoned with: their tolerance about caterpillars and beetles and other non-human life forms did not quite extend to artists.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“Anyone literate can take an implement in hand and make marks on a flat surface. Being a writer, however, seems to be a socially acknowledged role, and one that carries some sort of weight or impressive significance - we hear a capital W on Writer.”
― Margaret Atwood, On Writers and Writing

“Around the age of seven I wrote a play. The protagonist was a giant; the theme was crime and punishment; the crime was lying, as befits a future novelist; the punishment was being squashed to death by the moon. 
...This play was not a raging success. As I recall, my brother and his pals came in and laughed at it, thus giving me an early experience of literary criticism.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“And once you've got clocks, you've got death and dead people, because time, as we know, runs on, and then it runs out, and dead people are situated outside of time, whereas living people are still immersed in it.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“Art was a kind of demonic possession. Art would dance you to death. It would move in and take you over, and then destroy you.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“Language is not morally neutral because the human brain is not neutral in its desires. Neither is the dog brain. Neither is the bird brain: crows hate owls. We like some things and dislike others, we approve of some things and disapprove of others. Such is the nature of being an organism.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“When I was an aspiring female poet, in the late 1950s, the notion of required sacrifice was simply accepted. The same was true for any sort of career for a woman, but Art was worse, because the sacrifice required was more complete. You couldn't be a wife and mother and also an artist, because each one of these things required total dedication. As nine-year-olds we'd all been trotted off to see the film The Red Shoes as a birthday-party treat: we remembered Moira Shearer, torn between Art and love, squashing herself under a train. Love and marriage pulled one way, Art another, and Art was a kind of demonic possession. Art would dance you to death. It would move in and take you over, and then destroy you. Or it would destroy you as an ordinary woman.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“You may find the subject a little peculiar. It is a little peculiar. Writing itself is a little peculiar.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“A book may outlive its author, and it moves too, and it too can be said to change - but not in the manner of the telling. It changes in the manner of the reading. As many commentators have remarked, works of literature are recreated by each generation of readers, who make them new by finding fresh meanings in them. The printed text of a book is thus like a musical score, which is not itself music, but becomes music when played by musicians, or "interpreted" by them, as we say. The act of reading a text is like playing music and listening to it at the same time, and the reader becomes its own interpreter.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“When I was eight we moved again, to another post-war bungalow, this time nearer the centre of Toronto, at that time a stodgy provincial city of seven hundred thousand. I was now faced with real life, in the form of other little girls — their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on whispering and vicious gossip, and an inability to pick up earthworms without wriggling all over and making mewing noises like a kitten. I was more familiar with the forthright mind set of boys: the rope burn on the wrist and the dead-finger trick were familiar to me — but little girls were almost an alien species. I was very curious about them, and remain so.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“Underneath all this was a sub layer of fear: the atomic bomb had exploded, the Cold War was on, Joe McCarthy had begun his Red-bashing; it was important to look as normal, as ordinary, as non-Communist as possible. It occurred to me that my parents, once the measure of sanity and reasonableness, might be viewed by others as eccentric; perhaps no worse than harmless loonies, but possibly atheists, or unsound in some other way. I did try to be like everyone else, though I didn't have much idea what 'everyone else' was supposed to be like.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — 'Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté. That's a light enough comment upon the disappointments of encountering the famous, or even the moderately well-known — they are always shorter and older and more ordinary than you expected - but there's a more sinister way of looking at it as well. In order for the pate* to be made and then eaten, the duck must first be killed. And who is it that does the killing?”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“But among the elect, martyrdom is always a possibility; and to be an artist is not altogether a choice - the God of Art picks you, not the other way around. Therefore the artistic vocation has an aura of tragedy and doom about it. 'We poets in our youth begin in gladness,' said Wordsworth, 'But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.' Consider Franz Kafka's story, 'A Fasting-Artist.' The fasting-artist is an artist dedicated completely to his art. This art is grotesque: the artist stays in a cage and starves himself— much like a self-mortifying Christian ascetic of old — and at first he is very popular: crowds flock to marvel at him. Then fashions change - the art-for-art's sake fashion was by Kafka's time falling out of widespread favour — and the fasting-artist ends up in a neglected corner of a circus menagerie, and people forget he's in the cage. Finally they poke around in the rotten straw and rediscover him, more dead than alive. Here's what happens next:
'I always wanted you to admire my fasting,' said the fasting-artist. 'And we do admire it,' said the overseer obligingly. 'But you shouldn't admire it,' the fasting-artist said. 'All right, we don't admire it then,' said the overseer, 'but why shouldn't we admire it?' 'Because I have to fast, I can't help it,' said the fasting-artist. 'Whatever next,' said the overseer. 'And why can't you help it?' 'Because,' said the fasting-artist... 'I could never find the nourishment I liked. Had I found it, believe me, I would never have caused any stir, and would have eaten my fill just like you and everyone else.' Those were his last words.. .”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“As Marilyn Monroe is rumoured to have said, 'If you're nobody you-can't be somebody unless you're somebody else.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“For whom does the writer write? The question poses itself most simply in the case of the diary-writer or journal-keeper. Only very occasionally is the answer specifically no one, but this is a misdirection, because we couldn't hear it unless a writer had put it in a book and published it for us to read. Here for instance is diary-writer Doctor Glas, from Hjalmar Soderberg's astonishing 1905 Swedish novel of the same name:
Now I sit at my open window, writing - for whom? Not for any friend or mistress. Scarcely for myself, even. I do not read today what I wrote yesterday; nor shall I read this tomorrow. I write simply so my hand can move, my thoughts move of their own accord. I write to kill a sleepless hour.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“When I was a young person reading whatever I could get my hands on, I came across some old books of my fathers, in a series called Everyman's Library. The endpapers of that date were a sort of William Morris design, with leaves and flowers and a lady in graceful medieval draperies carrying a scroll and a branch with three apples or other spherical fruit on it. Interwoven among the shrubbery there was a motto: 'Everyman I will go with thee and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side.' This was very reassuring to me. The books were declaring that they were my pals; they promised to accompany me on my travels; and they would not only offer me some helpful hints, they'd be right there by my side whenever I really needed them. It's always nice to have someone you can depend on.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“The Underworld guards the secrets. It's got the skeletons in the closet, and any other skeletons you might wish to get your hands on. It's got the stories, or quite a few of them. 'There is something down there and you want it told,' as poet Gwendolyn MacEwen says. The swimmer among the jewelled dead — double-gendered, like the seer Tiresias — in Adrienne Rich's poem 'Diving Into the Wreck' has a similar motive:
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there ...”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“I was holding forth about this a while ago at a dinner for a bunch of writers. 'Gilgamesh was the first writer,' I said. 'He wants the secret of life and death, he goes through hell, he comes back, but he hasn't got immortality, all he's got is two stories — the one about his trip, and the other, extra one about the flood. So the only thing he really brings back with him is a couple of stories.
Then he's really, really tired, and then he writes the whole thing down on a stone.'
'Yeah, that's what it is,' said the writers. 'You go, you get the story, you're whacked out, you come back and write it all down on a stone. Or it feels like a stone by the sixth draft,' they added.
'Go where?' I said.
'To where the story is,' they said.
Where is the story? The story is in the dark. That is why inspiration is thought of as coming in flashes. Going into a narrative — into the narrative process - is a dark road. You can't see your way ahead. Poets know this too; they too travel the dark roads. The well of inspiration is a hole that leads downwards.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“I will give the last word to the poet Ovid, who has the Sibyl of Cumae speak, not only for herself, but also — we suspect — for him, and for the hopes and fates of all writers:
But still, the fates will leave me my voice,
and by my voice I shall be known.”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“In what ways, if any, does talent set you apart? Does it exempt you from the duties and responsibilities expected of others? Or does it load you up with even more duties and responsibilities, but of a different kind?”
― Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing