6 Margaret Atwood Quotes on Creativity

Margaret Atwood quotes on creativity

36. I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

37. The day I became a poet was a sunny day of no particular ominousness. I was walking across the football field, not because I was sports-minded or had plans to smoke a cigarette behind the field house - the only other reason for going there - but because this was my normal way home from school. I was scuttling along in my usual furtive way, suspecting no ill, when a large invisible thumb descended from the sky and pressed down on the top of my head. A poem formed. It was quite a gloomy poem: the poems of the young usually are. It was a gift, this poem - a gift from an anonymous donor, and, as such, both exciting and sinister at the same time. I suspect this is the way all poets begin writing poetry, only they don't want to admit it, so they make up more rational explanations. But this is the true explanation, and I defy anyone to disprove it.

46. I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time. Wordsworth was sort of right when he said, 'Poets in their youth begin in gladness/ But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.' Except that sometimes poets skip the gladness and go straight to the despondency. Why is that? Part of it is the conditions under which poets work - giving all, receiving little in return from an age that by and large ignores them - and part of it is cultural expectation - 'The lunatic, the lover and the poet,' says Shakespeare, and notice which comes first. My own theory is that poetry is composed with the melancholy side of the brain, and that if you do nothing but, you may find yourself going slowly down a long dark tunnel with no exit. I have avoided this by being ambidextrous: I write novels too. But when I find myself writing poetry again, it always has the surprise of that first unexpected and anonymous gift.

58. A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

76. Put yourself in a different room, that's what the mind is for.

88. You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.