YouSaid · the spoken record

Margaret Atwood

lines on the record
115
first
2022-02-23
most recent
2022-02-23
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “I want to know there's a good and a bad for every human technology that we make. I want to know what's the upside, what's the downside, cost benefit, but also what are people using this for because it's so frequently that we invent something for one purpose and then people find a whole different purpose for it or lots of purposes. For instance, Velcro. I haven't invented Velcro had no idea what it was for But now we know it's for putting on your shoes, Tim. So curiosity, genetics curiosity and if you want to go to the astrology we can do that too.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Let's begin with the genetics. My mum lived to ninety seven. My dad not quite so long eighty six, but my mum was very they were both very curious about things. So there's always something new coming along. And you may have noticed that I dabble in those things from time to time because I'm interested in them. I want to know how they work.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Extremely interesting story because it was several stories and there was no resolution. We never actually found out through the historical record whether Grace Marx had murdered anybody or not. So I wrote a novel called Alias Grace and then that gets turned into a Netflix series, mini-series by Sarah Pauli. And Sarah Pauli is an actress, director, producer, scriptwriter, who wrote to me when she was seventeen years old and said I have to do this. I said. So cute. But she did it. Finally, she said it only took me like 20 years, and she did a great job of it. So that's that story. So yeah, started as a poem, turned into a television play, turned into a novel, and then turned back into a television series only this time a more accurate one.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “I don't. It's true. There's so many things you don't remember. So it was black and white. And I was using only one source for that because this is an historical person. And the person who had been writing about Grace had got a lot of things wrong. So I did the play for television. And then years passed, a number of years passed, maybe about twelve years, and there I was in Switzerland. It would be Switzerland, you know, home of Carl Jung. And I started writing this piece of prose, and I thought, so who is this? It's Grace Marx. And she's dissatisfied with the job I did in that play. She wants me to go back and take another look. So this time we went to a lot of sources, not just the one. And we found this.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “So essentially, it was open season. You could do whatever you wanted, and there weren't people saying you have to do either this or that. There were no people like that. So we just did whatever. And it seems to have been true that I will have written poems about something and then some years later that will turn up in some other form. So, for instance, I wrote some poetry in which this character called Grace Marx makes an appearance. And then some years later I wrote a television play about that. Back when television was still black and white, Don't remember that, Tim.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yes, and why do I do that? Because nobody told me not to. There weren't any Once upon a time, Tim, a long, long time ago, and you aren't going to believe this, but there were no creative writing schools.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Of the people in the fort didn't know that, and the cavalry didn't know what was happening in the fort. So you've got a lot of tension. So that's the Odyssey. So here comes Odysseus. Nobody knows where he's been all these years. And there's Penelope holding out. Justice, she's about to give in, he turns up in disguise. A lot of stories involve in disguise. Then we go on from there with a great finale.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Gossip, telling stories about people, telling stories about just about anything and narrative. So this happens, that happens, this happens, that happens. And that goes all the way back to, for instance, Homer. So you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, you can see that there's a narrative approach. Very useful. The Iliad starts in the middle of things. And so to a lot of novels, so you've got several ways you can start. You can start at the beginning and go on until you reach the end, or you can start the middle. Or you can start at the end and then go back and pick it up. But poetry, lyric poetry is different. It's got lots of stories in it. So my thing about the Odyssey is that you know all those Westerns in which they were holding the fort and the cavalry was riding to the rescue.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Well, I'm not, but I'm the living demonstration that this isn't true. But it's my theory that poetry comes from a different part of the brain and the part that's more closely allied to patterning music, mathematics like that. Whereas novels come from the part that is more closely associated with gossip.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “We understand why poets often have quite interesting lives, but I was lucky to be able to do both, so people think I'm moderately sane in the bell curve of poets and novelists with, let's say, well, I don't know. I mean, I guess a lot of novelists drank a lot too, but let us say that poets are often, let's say, their life trajectory is frequently more erratic than that of novelists. How can we put this gently? And especially female poets, I mean, it was just assumed in the 50s that they were sort of crazy.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “My theory, but you can't ever test it out without great cruelty. Guess what? Hats don't write poetry or anything else. So it has to be people that you would practice the great cruelty on. So you would have to wire up their heads and you can wire up their heads for novels, no problem, because you know novels, it's 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. So you actually have to work at writing novels. It's called work. You have to sit down. It's like a job. You have to put in the hours. But with poetry, it's exactly the opposite. You don't know when something may strike you. And that's why poets are so annoying to people who are not poets, because they'll be looking out the window, and you'll say, could you please mow the lawn? And they'll say, don't interrupt. No, no, go away. I mean, it can be very annoying.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Yes, I've bought several calligraphy sets intending to use them, but Tim, I haven't used them yet. But I'm going to. I'm going to. I'm going to do that.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Apparently, they're not always teaching cursive to young people. So we're going to have a whole generation who don't know how to sign their names. They will only know how to print their names. Anyway, yes, cursive, which we are all taught in school with scratchy little metal nibs that you dipped in ink wells. You probably didn't do that because they probably had ballpoints by your day.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “I do know that you do. I actually do know that, and poetry is more likely to be written on the run or on the fly and not necessarily sitting down.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “That's pretty right. Yes, you have to factor in the going swimming part is about a very cold lake. So we're not talking about Florida here or pools. We're talking about screaming. Run in screaming.”

    2022-02-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #573: Margaret Atwood — A Living Legend on Creative Process, The Handmaid’s Tale, Being a Mercenary Child, Resisting Labels, the Poet Rug Exchange, Liminal Beings, Burning Questions, Practical Utopias, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT