Quote

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

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Kate Atkinson
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Real
Backdrop
World
Exes
Artificial
Perhaps
Tell
Place
Stories
Must
Machina

More quotes by Kate Atkinson

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I think about death a lot, I really do, because I can't believe I won't exist. It's the ego isn't it? I feel that I should retreat into a better form of Zen Buddhism than this kind of ego-dominated thing. But I don't know, I mean, I want to come back as a tree but I suspect that it's just not going to happen, is it?
Kate Atkinson
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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
Kate Atkinson
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The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.
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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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I'm a lapsed Quaker. I don't go to meetings any more. But I'm very drawn to Catholicism - all that glitter. I'd love to be a Catholic. I think it would be fantastic - faith, forgiveness, absolution, extreme unction - all these wonderful words. I don't think anyone who was ever born a Catholic hasn't died a Catholic, no matter how lapsed they are.
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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If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.
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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Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.
Kate Atkinson
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I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.
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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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.
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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Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.
Kate Atkinson
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Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.
Kate Atkinson
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Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.
Kate Atkinson
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The past is what you take with you.
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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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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Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.
Kate Atkinson