Margaret Atwood Quotes about Character

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Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.

Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.

Margaret Atwood

Book, Character, Anxiety

Margaret Atwood (1990). “Margaret Atwood: Conversations”, Princeton, N.J. : Ontario Review Press

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

Margaret Atwood

Moving, Character, Mean

"Do keep up". Interview with Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. April 12, 2004.

Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.

Margaret Atwood

Character, Boys, Kind

Margaret Atwood (2011). “Wilderness Tips”, p.16, Anchor

People talking about politics usually start from the ass end backwards in that they think you have a political agenda, and then you make your work fit that cookie cutter. It's the other way around. One works by simple observation, looking into things. It's usually called insight and out of that comes your view - not that you have the view first and then squash everything to make it fit. I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

Margaret Atwood

Character, Cutting, Simple

Interview With Marilyn Berlin Snell, www.motherjones.com. July/August 1997.

Even in the tragedies, Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools. He puts in certain middle-range characters. And when you go to the Globe, you realize how that all works. The people who paid more sat in seats around the edge. Everybody else paid a penny. They put it into a tin box - that's why we call it the "box office." They stood in the pit, but they were very close, so when Hamlet was doing his soliloquy, it was addressed to you, the audience - right there.

Margaret Atwood

Character, People, Office

"Margaret Atwood Remixes Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” as a Prison Drama". Interview With Maddie Oatman, www.motherjones.com. September/October 2016.

I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.

Margaret Atwood

School, Character, Gossip

Margaret Atwood (1984). “Second words: selected critical prose”, Beacon Press, 1984

The cemetery has ... an inscription: 'Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me.' Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing.

Margaret Atwood

Art, Character, Two

Margaret Atwood (2007). “The Blind Assassin: A Novel”, p.44, Anchor

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.

Margaret Atwood

Book, Character, People

"Double bluff". Interview with Katharine Viner, www.theguardian.com. September 16, 2000.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

Margaret Atwood

Character, Cutting, Views

Interview with Marilyn Berlin Snell, www.motherjones.com. July/August 1997.

In the early fight for women's rights, the point was not that women were morally superior or better. The conversation was about the difference between men and women - power, privilege, voting rights, etc. Unfortunately, it quickly moved to the "women are better" argument. If this were true in life or in fiction, we wouldn't have any dark or deep characters. We wouldn't have any Salomes, Carmens, Ophelias. We wouldn't have any jealousy or passion.

Margaret Atwood

Passion, Character, Fighting

Source: www.motherjones.com