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I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.

Kate Atkinson

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Kate Atkinson
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Feel
Feels
Dreadful
Something
Realize
Already
Realizing
Happen
Waiting
Happens

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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.
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No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.
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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
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Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.
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I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed.
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The past is what you take with you.
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I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
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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.
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Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I'm totally insane.
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Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.
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Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
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They said love made you strong, but in Louise's opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn't get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
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As I watch, the sky fills with clouds of snow feathers from every kind of bird there ever was and even some that only exist in the imagination, like the bluebirds that fly over the rainbow.
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She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.
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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.
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