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Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.

Kate Atkinson

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Kate Atkinson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Sylvie
Gratitude
Mistake
Sometimes
Love

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Julia's vocabulary was chock-full of strangely archaic words - spiffing, crumbs, jeepers - that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.
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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
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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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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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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.'
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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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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.
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The past is what you take with you.
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She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.
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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 feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.
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Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
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You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.
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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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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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The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.
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I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.
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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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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.
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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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