Status Updates From Margaret Atwood: Conversations

"Morality" is your relationship with yourself. "Ethics" is your relationship with other people.

Ways of going crazy are culturally determined.

p: 69: It does annoy me when students, prompted by the approach of their teacher, ask, “What is the poet trying to say?” It implies the poet is some kind of verbal cripple who can’t quite “say” what he “means” and has no resort to a lot of round-the-mulberry-bush, thereby putting the student to a great deal of trouble extracting his “meaning”, like a prize out of a box of Cracker Jack.

p.22: I don’t think poetry expresses emotion. It evokes emotion from the reader, and that is a very different thing. As someone once said, “If you want to express emotion, scream.” If you want to evoke emotion it’s more complicated. Listening to someone scream doesn’t necessarily make you want to scream. It makes you want to shut the window or say, “Shut up!”