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The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.

Kate Atkinson

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Kate Atkinson
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Things
Life
Compared
Ties
Getting
Great
Writing
Thing

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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 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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Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
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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?
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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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Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.
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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.
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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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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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The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.
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Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.
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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.
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Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.
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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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Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I'm totally insane.
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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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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.
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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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Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.
Kate Atkinson