Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.
Interpretation
Genres are fluid and interconnected rather than rigid and separate.
Margaret Atwood's quote suggests that artistic genres are not strict categories but rather dynamic and permeable spaces where ideas, styles, and influences can intermingle. This fluidity allows for a rich exchange of creativity, leading to innovation and new forms of expression, as creators draw inspiration from various genres and defy traditional boundaries.
In practice
In a discussion about modern literature, you might use this quote to emphasize how contemporary works blend multiple genres.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.
To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.
Over time, I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than "seeing the world with words." From the moment he begins to use words like colors in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is, and he breaks the bones of language to find his own voice. For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time.
I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.
Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.
There is no room in music for the second-rate - it might just as well be the nineteenth-rate.
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