Success Quote by Margaret Atwood

Writing, Atwood reminds us, is an industry of discard. The line lands with the dry snap of a craftsperson who’s tired of romantic myths: the novel is not born whole, it’s manufactured through attrition. By invoking the "ratio" of failures, she borrows the language of engineering and production, quietly demystifying creativity into something measurable, almost statistical. Inspiration doesn’t disappear here; it’s simply downgraded from divine spark to raw material, and raw material comes with waste.

The wastebasket is the perfect prop because it’s both literal and symbolic. Literally, it’s where bad sentences go. Symbolically, it’s the hidden infrastructure that makes good writing possible. Atwood’s joke is evolutionary: the wastebasket didn’t show up as a decorative accessory; it emerged because writers needed a sanctioned place for shame, experiment, excess, and revision. That evolutionary framing also smuggles in permission. Failure isn’t an anomaly to be corrected, it’s an expected byproduct of the system.

Context matters: Atwood’s career has unfolded alongside workshops, MFA culture, and a publishing economy that sells authors as brands with seamless "voices". Her sentence pushes back against the curated author persona. It’s a small act of realism with a moral: if you want the finished book, you have to respect the garbage that produced it. The subtext is bracingly democratic, too - the difference between amateurs and professionals often isn’t talent, but tolerance for throwing things away.