Quotes from 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn't even begin to solve.

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 5 million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think, "what a lazy, good-for-nothing animal," they are, in fact, working very, very hard.

What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?

The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.

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

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.

Life wasn't about becoming, was it? It was about being.

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

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

Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.

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.

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.

She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is.

Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.

Do not equate nationalism with patriotism... Nationalism is the first step on the road to Fascism.