Kate Atkinson Quotes

I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.

There are always things I find difficult - being in crowds, remembering faces. I do like routines. I always travel with someone. My life in Avignon is a very quiet one. I have an apartment that looks over the whole city. I can drop into town, but a lot of the time I write from home. In some respects I still live a very quiet, simple life.

I'm with people all the time so I often go away on my own.

It is important from time to time to slow down, to go away by yourself, and simply be.

I aspire only to silence.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

The older I get, the more of a recluse I turn into. I love the social aspect of my work. It's like a commune and gets very intense and very sociable. Then when I am not working, I shut myself away, so I can see myself living up a mountain.

It's important to have quiet time and isolation.

I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.

Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it.

France was very opposite of the show-business experience I'd been living; I was anonymous and alone. I wore no makeup, wore the same clothes every day. And I wrote and wrote and wrote.

I spend an awful lot of time by myself and enjoy that.

Silence and solitude are more distracting to me than chatter and commotion.

I am not reclusive. I just have a private life.

I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

I enjoy my time alone.

I try to factor solitude into my life because more and more, that's becoming a very precious and rare commodity.

I like solitude. I like the anomalous life. I like a quiet life.

I like my peace and quiet whenever I can grab it.

Writing is a tribute to solitude. It is choosing introversion over extroversion, lonely hours/days/weeks/years over fun and sociability.

I'm not a very glamorous person. I like to just sit alone in a room and read a book or meditate.

You have to remember that I'm a guy who is happiest in a dark room just thinking.

I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write

I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep.