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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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Kate Atkinson
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Insane
Totally
Writers
Look
Looks
Great
Would
Published

More quotes by 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.
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The past is what you take with you.
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If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.
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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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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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I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
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She doesn't believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.
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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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Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.
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The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.
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.
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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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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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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.
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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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Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
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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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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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Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
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