Quotes On Writing - A Collection of Famous Writers

Margaret Atwood

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

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If I waited for perfection I would never write a word.

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A word after a word after a word is power.

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

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Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are written for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

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The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

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A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

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So much better to travel than to arrive.

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Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.

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In the end, we'll all become stories.