Kate Atkinson Quotes

A novel and its writer are inseparable: you are your books. A play's not like that at all. 'Abandonment's not mine - it's everyone's. I wanted it to be a co-operative thing because I was tired of that anal control that I have over novels.

- Kate Atkinson

I need to be very isolated to write, and unfortunately isolation is often quite difficult to find. My ideal writing environment would be a country house hotel in the middle of nowhere, with full room service.

- Kate Atkinson

The legacy of the fairy story in my brain is that everything will work out. In fiction it would be very hard for me, as a writer, to give a bad ending to a good character, or give a good ending to a bad character. That's probably not a very postmodern thing to say.

- Kate Atkinson

Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved, although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.

- 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.

- 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

The cult of the individual is killing us. I think Twitter signals the death of western civilisation, but people have been saying that since Demosthenes.

- Kate Atkinson

When I started 'Case Histories,' the characters were all going to Antarctica on a cruise. The first part was called 'Embarkation.' It was supposed to be about everyone preparing to embark on the cruise, but it mushroomed into an entire book.

- 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.

- Kate Atkinson

But I, you know, if I could choose a period to go back to, I think I would like to live through the Blitz. 'Cause you do read so many accounts of people saying they're living their lives at such an intense pitch that it was a completely different way of living.

- Kate Atkinson

It was failing part of my Ph.D. that led me into novel-writing. By then I was 29, had remarried and had a second baby. It struck me that I'd lost my path in life and I felt frustrated. That's when I started to write.

- 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

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.

- Kate Atkinson

Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.

- Kate Atkinson

I was an only child and grew up in York where my parents ran a surgical supplies shop. When I say I wish I had brothers and sisters, friends say it's not what it's cracked up to be, but I think it must be good to have someone who knew you from the beginning.

- Kate Atkinson

I don't want to spoil the magic, but it's a very curious thing that honestly baffles me. It's the nearest we'll ever get to playing God, to suddenly produce these fully formed creatures. It is a bit odd. Other aspects you work out more - you rework sentences, you rework imagery. But not characters.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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?

- Kate Atkinson

I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don't think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean, I can hang on to a sentence for several years and then put it into a book that's completely different from the one it started in.

- 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.

- Kate Atkinson

Because I've a track record of talking about books I never write, in Australia they think I'm about to write a book about Jane Austen. Something I said at some festival.

- Kate Atkinson

My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.

- Kate Atkinson

When I'm writing, my neural pathways get blocked. I can't read. I can barely hold a conversation without forgetting words and names. I wish I could wear the same clothes and eat the same food each day.

- Kate Atkinson

I've always loved mysteries, the something there that you didn't know, and with 'Case Histories' I just decide to make that more up-front.

- Kate Atkinson

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

- Kate Atkinson

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

- 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?'

- Kate Atkinson

Without siblings you get quite a skewed vision of yourself and of the world. I always felt I didn't understand how it worked. I remember feeling quite lonely.

- Kate Atkinson

I think you have to learn for yourself how to write. I'm slightly mystified by creative writing courses - God love them - because I can't understand how you can explain a process that I find so baffling.

- 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.

- Kate Atkinson

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

- Kate Atkinson

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

- Kate Atkinson

Writing for me is quite a plastic form, a kind of mental sculpture, although that sounds weird. It acquires its character and its depth as it goes along.

- Kate Atkinson

Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it's rubbish.

- Kate Atkinson

'Feminism' is such an incredibly awkward word for us these days, isn't it? Not to be feminist would be bizarre, wouldn't it?

- Kate Atkinson

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

- 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

My work is not my life. I started writing quite late, I didn't have that 'writing is everything, my art is all.' You have to be able to recognise the difference between the two.

- Kate Atkinson