A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
Margaret Atwood (via wordpainting)
May 3, 2012 | The New School | New York City
Margaret Atwood discusses with Amy Grace Loyd what it means to write in the age of the internet in the first installment of our Dialogue Series, part of the2012 PEN World Voices Festival.
“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
