Kate Atkinson Life Quotations

I'm trying to take more nothing time - and that means sacrificing doing. It's partly to do with age, partly to do with the fact that writing takes up a lot of space in your head. My ideal is to go back to when I was a child. My life is quieter than it used to be. More and more I don't really want to talk to people. I'd make a good nun, actually.

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.

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.

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

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.

What did you do when the worst thing that could happen to you had already happened - how did you live life then? You had to hand it to Theo Wyre, just carrying on living required a strength and courage that most people didn't have.

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

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.