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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: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Alternate
Novelists
Bigs
History
Thing
Fascinates

More quotes by 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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Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I'm totally insane.
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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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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The past is what you take with you.
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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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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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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Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
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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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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If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.
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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She doesn't believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.
Kate Atkinson
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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.
Kate Atkinson
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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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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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Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.
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 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