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The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.

Kate Atkinson

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Kate Atkinson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Beginning
Silence
Word
Ends
Stories

More quotes by Kate Atkinson

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Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
Kate Atkinson
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Jennifer had never liked the pain of remembering what had happened, but for Theo it was the pain that kept Laura alive in his memory. He was afraid that if it ever began to heal she would disappear.
Kate Atkinson
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She doesn't believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.
Kate Atkinson
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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
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He was born a politician. No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.
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If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.
Kate Atkinson
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You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.
Kate Atkinson
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Fairy tales opened up a door into my imagination - they don't conform to the reality that's around you as a child. I started reading when I was three and read everything, but I wanted to be an actress.
Kate Atkinson
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You must never believe everything they say about a person. Generally speaking, most of it will be lies, half-truths at best.
Kate Atkinson
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I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.
Kate Atkinson
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I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn't, so I think it is possibly the end.
Kate Atkinson
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When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.
Kate Atkinson
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Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics - such as: if there are less than five million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning.
Kate Atkinson
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The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.
Kate Atkinson
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I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.
Kate Atkinson
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Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.
Kate Atkinson
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Feminism is such an incredibly awkward word for us these days, isnt it? Not to be feminist would be bizarre, wouldnt it?
Kate Atkinson
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I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
Kate Atkinson
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Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'
Kate Atkinson
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Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all -- a backdrop for the stories we must tell.
Kate Atkinson