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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
Jórvík
Feels
Getting
Title
Writing
Goal
Vague
Things
Rather
Ending
Bigs
Titles
Ends
Goals
Ideas
Apart
Book
Beginning
Ambience
Feel
Books
Probable

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.
Kate Atkinson
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(although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)
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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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Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.
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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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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
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all -- a backdrop for the stories we must tell.
Kate Atkinson
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Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.
Kate Atkinson
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Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.
Kate Atkinson
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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.
Kate Atkinson
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As I watch, the sky fills with clouds of snow feathers from every kind of bird there ever was and even some that only exist in the imagination, like the bluebirds that fly over the rainbow.
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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The past is what you take with you.
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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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