“After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing”

— Margaret Atwood

On Writing Poetry (1995)
Context: After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing; and through them, and some of my teachers, I discovered that there was a whole subterranean Wonderland of Canadian writing that was going on just out of general earshot and sight

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the f…" by Margaret Atwood?

Margaret Atwood 348

Canadian writer 1939

Related quotes

“I write with two things in mind. I want to be right with my fellow economists. After all, I've made my life as a professional economist, so I'm careful that my economics is as it should be. But I have long felt that there's no economic proposition that can't be stated in clear, accessible language. So I try to be right with my fellow economists, but I try to have an audience of any interested, intelligent person.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Booknotes interview (1994)

“My worst vice is gluttony. I try to keep myself under control because I’m an athlete, but once a week I like to pig out and act like a normal person.”

Gianluigi Buffon (1978) Italian association football player

Buffon, as quoted in Football Italia (07/01/07)

“Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”

Annie Ernaux (1940) French writer

Source: Quoted in Melodrama after the tears, ed. Jörg Metelmann and Scott Loren (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), p. 178

“There were times when other people said I was on the short list, but as time passed and nothing happened, I didn’t expect the recognition would come because people who were familiar with my work were slowly dying off.”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Quoted in: William Grimes, " Leonid Hurwicz, Nobel Economist, Dies at 90 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/business/26hurwicz.html?_r=0" at nytimes.com, June 26, 2008.

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”

Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People

Variant: You can make more friends in two months by being interested in them, than in two years by making them interested in you.
Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), p. 52 (in 1998 edition)

“I must learn more about these people―try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

“It was in the 1960s that I began the detailed study of public regulation. My interests were aroused, and my faith in the cliches of the subject destroyed, as so often with other subjects, by the discussions with my friend, Aaron Director. This wonderful man is that rarest of scholars: a clear-headed, imaginative, erudite man who enjoys the task of constructing luminous and original theories but does not even write them down!”

George Stigler (1911–1991) American economist

"George J. Stigler - Biographical," 1982

“I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Mr. Clarke (1816-04-01) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“A lot of times, as I like to say, I was the only chip in the cookie…I chose to embrace who I am and what I do, and keep my head down and keep writing, and hoped that things would change. But it was lonely in the sense that I was the only.”

Beverly Jenkins (1951) American author of historical and contemporary romance novels

On being the sole African American romance novelist at the start of her career in “Romance Novelist Beverly Jenkins Talks Normalizing Diversity in Her Genre” https://www.shondaland.com/inspire/books/a12821649/beverly-jenkins-romance-interview/ in Shondaland (2017 Oct 12)

“When I endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour to pass sentence upon it, and either to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Chap. I.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part III

“After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Margaret Atwood 348

Related quotes

Related topics