Kate Atkinson Quotes

I know what it's like to have a bunch of material that's working that you don't care about. You want to die.

Boy, there are days where I get up and say 'Where the hell did my talent go? Look at this crap that I'm producing here. This is terrible. Look, I wrote this yesterday. I hate this, I hate this.'

When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.

I think I need the demons in order to write, but the demons have gone. It bothers me a lot. I've tried and tried, but I just can't seem to find a melody.

When I can't write, it depresses me.

When I couldn't write, I felt like a zombie.

It's hard to keep a positive attitude coming to work every day, feeling like you're getting better when the same result is losing.

That's not always a nice feeling when you've given everything, and it's not enough - it's an empty feeling.

I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. (“Advance Notice”)

All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.

I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.

Each book gets harder, each book gets harder and harder. I always feel like crying when I have to write.

Hours later the blank sheet still stared at me, and I beat my fist against the desk in fury and fustration, striking it so hard my hand bled. That is how heavy a secret can become. It can make blood flow easier than ink.

There are days when I should be writing, and I am so tired that I can't. And the fatigue also affects my emotions, making me not even care about writing. There are days when I wake up so angry I can barely speak, and also days when I am so sad.

God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names.

I feel like a human pinata. The disappointing thing is, no candy is going to spill out.

There's been a lot of times that I thought I'd never work again; I was really bummed out.

Pitching... sometimes I did so poorly, it brought me to tears.

My film directorial career has been nothing but repetition of one failure after another!

I need a release from whatever I'm writing.

Basically, all anyone has to do is ask me for fun details or tell me to be creative, and my mind turns to mud. I am instantly the most boring person you've ever met.

When I'm stuck in my writing, the world is amiss. If I'm eating a sandwich, it's an unsettled sandwich. If I'm in the shower, it's an incorrect shower. It's profoundly uncomfortable. But it's what keeps me pushing.

More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.

My stories are never quite good enough.

Why do we work so hard to feel so terrible.