3 Margaret Atwood Quotes on Bias

Margaret Atwood quotes on bias

35. It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography - but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off. This last may be true, at any rate of poets: Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course - being also a novelist - am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

38. I did not know that the rules about these things were different if you were female. I did not know that 'poetess' was an insult, and that I myself would some day be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know - yet - that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me - yet - the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

86. We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.