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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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Kate Atkinson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 20
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
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Feel
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Probable
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Vague
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Ambience
More quotes by Kate Atkinson
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
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
She doesn't believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.
Kate Atkinson
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
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
The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.
Kate Atkinson
Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.
Kate Atkinson
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
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
Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.
Kate Atkinson
Feminism is such an incredibly awkward word for us these days, isnt it? Not to be feminist would be bizarre, wouldnt it?
Kate Atkinson
The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.
Kate Atkinson
I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.
Kate Atkinson
If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.
Kate Atkinson
Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
Kate Atkinson
I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.
Kate Atkinson
Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.
Kate Atkinson
Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.
Kate Atkinson
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
You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.
Kate Atkinson