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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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Kate Atkinson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Spent
Literature
Four
American
Years
Doctorate
Doctorates
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More quotes by 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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When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.
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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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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I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.
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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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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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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The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.
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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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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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.
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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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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Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
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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The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.
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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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