Best 121 quotes of Kate Atkinson on MyQuotes

Kate Atkinson

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    Kate Atkinson

    (although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)

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    Kate Atkinson

    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.

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    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.'

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    Kate Atkinson

    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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    Kate Atkinson

    Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

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    Kate Atkinson

    Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?

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    Kate Atkinson

    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.

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    Kate Atkinson

    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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    Kate Atkinson

    He was born a politician. No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.

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    Kate Atkinson

    Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.

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    Kate Atkinson

    I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.

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    Kate Atkinson

    I can't help but think that it's an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn't bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it's true they are much harder to find.

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    Kate Atkinson

    I can't imagine what it would be like to write in a relaxed state. I'm going to be writing some stories for my own interest. I want to experiment with different things and see if I can approach writing with much less control and in a better psychological state. It will be like breaking out of a straitjacket.

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    Kate Atkinson

    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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    Kate Atkinson

    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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    Kate Atkinson

    I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.

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    Kate Atkinson

    I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere - 1730 to around 1870 is the most interesting period.

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    Kate Atkinson

    If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.

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    Kate Atkinson

    If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.

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    Kate Atkinson

    If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.

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    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.

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    Kate Atkinson

    I have been to the world's end and back and now I know what I would put in my bottom drawer .I would put my sisters.

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    Kate Atkinson

    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.

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    Kate Atkinson

    In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

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    Kate Atkinson

    I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

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    Kate Atkinson

    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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    Kate Atkinson

    It's been said that the men in my books have been absent, or weak, or creepy.

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    Kate Atkinson

    It was a long time ago now. And it was yesterday.

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    Kate Atkinson

    It wasn't that [he] believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.

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    Kate Atkinson

    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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    Kate Atkinson

    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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    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.

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    Kate Atkinson

    Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.

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    Kate Atkinson

    Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.

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    Kate Atkinson

    Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance.

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    Kate Atkinson

    My father was an autodidact. It wasn't a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education - he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn't allowed to go.

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    Kate Atkinson

    No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.

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    Kate Atkinson

    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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    Kate Atkinson

    Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.

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    Kate Atkinson

    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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    Kate Atkinson

    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.

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    Kate Atkinson

    Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.

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    Kate Atkinson

    She doesn't believe in dogs," Bridget said. "Dogs are hardly an article of faith," Sylvie said.

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    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.

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    Kate Atkinson

    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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    Kate Atkinson

    Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.

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    Kate Atkinson

    Sometimes I would like to cry. I close my eyes. Why weren't we designed so that we can close our ears as well? (Perhaps because we would never open them.) Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?

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    Kate Atkinson

    Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.

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    Kate Atkinson

    Sylvie's knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, 'The sign that one has acquired one's learning from reading novels rather than an education.

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    Kate Atkinson

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