Kate Atkinson Quotes

You can't wait for someone to give you a show. That can't be the first time you're writing and drawing a character.

I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out.

I think writing is the most underrated thing in Hollywood.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy that kind of process.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby; it's a lot of effort!

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

If I have a long period of time away from acting, I tend to write.

Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they're communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.

Of course, I write. I have stories to tell. But I don't want to do superficial stuff any more.

Acting is probably what I'm best at, but there are certain stories kind of rattling around in my head that I like the idea of developing over time.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

Writing is more important than being a writer.

I would say, A, you can't really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it's something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.

No author can create a character out of nothing. He must have a model to give him a starting point; but then his imagination goes to work, he builds him up, adding a trait here, a trait there, which his model did not possess.

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.