10 Great Quotes About Poetry, Writing, and Writers by Margaret Atwood

“A word after a word after a word after a word is power.”

“I don’t think of poetry as a ‘rational’ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.”

“All writers learn from the dead. As long as you continue to write, you continue to explore the work of writers who have preceded you; you also feel judged and held to account by them.”

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

“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.”

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”

“All writers feel struck by the limitations of language.”

“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.”

“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