Kate Atkinson Quotes

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

In Germany, I have been called the Queen of Kitsch, but I don't mind that - as long as people buy the books.

Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

Every writer hopes his or her book will be its own thing.

When you write a book, you're an expert, and people look at you in a different way.

It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.

In the two novels I have published, it was my fortune at different times, and from different persons, to hear the most unqualified censure long before it was possible for me to hear the voice of the public. But my temper was not altered, nor my courage subdued.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

I had a very realistic expectation of the level of success that it was possible to attain writing romance novels.

'Pitchfork' said something like, 'Michael Imperioli wrote a book that sounds like Lou Reed fan fiction,' which maybe it is. It's fiction, and I'm a fan. But it's not about me, and it's not a Lou Reed book.

The myth of Naipaul... has long been a farce.

I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.

One of the things you want as a successful writer is the anonymity.

All my big heroes are literary, writers.

All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.

I have been called 'The American De Maupassant.' Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don't like to be compared to a filthy writer.

Women writers are often conflated with their narrators - as if we can't consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.

I am a novelist through and through.

I thought I had to write literature and add my name to the list of great Southern storytellers. Fortunately for me, no one wanted to read any of those stories. They got rejected by everyone. Sometimes, I would get a note saying they liked the writing, but the story simply didn't work.

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

I did a lot of studying of great writers. I read that Hemingway rewrote 'The Sun Also Rises' 39 times.

I know very well that one cannot become an author by just writing a book.

A misconception that exists in the eyes of the general reading population is that authors make truckloads of money.