Quote

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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Kate Atkinson
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jórvík
Reading
Fairy
Read
Actresses
Three
Tales
Reality
Door
Around
Doors
Wanted
Started
Conform
Everything
Imagination
Actress
Children
Child
Opened

More quotes by Kate Atkinson

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If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.
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Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.
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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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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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Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
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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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Feminism is such an incredibly awkward word for us these days, isnt it? Not to be feminist would be bizarre, wouldnt it?
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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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Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.
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I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.
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You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.
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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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Become such as you are, having learned what that is.
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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I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
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The past is what you take with you.
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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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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Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.
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(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
Kate Atkinson