Margaret Atwood

New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.

We get the papers: I prefer broadsheets because I had the fear of God put into me by the tabloids and, though I'm very much over it, I still don't really like to read them. It's a destructive vernacular that makes me angry and scared, and it is all sensationalist onomatopoeia and alliteration.

An independent state does not pay too dear a price for its independence in accepting the sufferings of war when it cannot avoid them; a state which has lost its independence may find at least some compensation in the fact that its protector procures for it peace with its neighbours.