- Margaret Atwood: I set the Handmaid's Tale in Cambridge, Massachusetts home of Harvard, which prides itself on being the heart of liberal democracy but started as a 17th century Puritan theocracy. Nobody figured out that Handmaid's Tale is about the Harvard English Department. They didn't hire women at that time.
- Husband of Margaret since 1968: My roomates who were both Southern gentlemen just thought she was awful. She had opinions. She'd march in and would take me over and make me write my paper. She knew she was good and she didn't bother to hide it. She alienated practically everybody in a certain group and then others, the real people who became our friends, just thought it was terrific.
- Woman in audience: Did I understand correctly that when you were a student at Harvard there was a library you couldn't go into because you were a girl?
- Margaret Atwood: [in a ghostly voice] When I was a student at Harvard. There was a library I couldn't go into because I was a girl. Uh. Yes.
- [smiles]
- Margaret Atwood: It was Lamont Library and it was for male undergraduates and it had all the modern poetry in it and I was a poet. I could get those books if I knew what they were. I could get them out. But I couldn't go in there and see what they had.
- Woman in audience: How can you express that so calmly?
- Margaret Atwood: Uh... because.
- [in a ghostly voice]
- Margaret Atwood: Because I'm old.