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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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Kate Atkinson
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Fascinates
Alternate
Novelists
Bigs
History
Thing

More quotes by 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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Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.
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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Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.
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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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.
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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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.
Kate Atkinson
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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.
Kate Atkinson
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Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.
Kate Atkinson
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(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
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
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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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The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.
Kate Atkinson
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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.
Kate Atkinson
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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
Kate Atkinson
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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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You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.
Kate Atkinson
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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.
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