Kate Atkinson Quotes

My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

I have an affinity for writing in the first person. I love the intimacy of being dropped inside the character.

The old handbook on writing is 'Write what you know.' I come from an autobiographical starting place almost all of the time, but it would be a mistake to presume that I'm not using fiction to extend the narrative.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person.

I put a lot of myself into my characters when I write.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.

I began writing fiction when I started running out of material in my own life.

When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!