Kate Atkinson

“He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.”

“The past is what you take with you.”

“The cult of the individual is killing us. I think Twitter signals the death of western civilisation, but people have been saying that since Demosthenes.”

“Pamela produced placid babies. "They don't tend to turn feral until they're two," she said.”

“Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.”

“Her true hope was that something would happen in the course of her time abroad that would mean she need never take the place. What that 'something' was she had no idea.”

“Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.”

“Popular versus literary—a false divide?”

“Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.'”

“All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.And this one is Teddy's.”

“I need to be very isolated to write, and unfortunately isolation is often quite difficult to find. My ideal writing environment would be a country house hotel in the middle of nowhere, with full room service.”

“I mean what else is there for a woman to do if she doesn't want to go from the parental to the marital home with nothing in between? 'An educated woman,'Millie amended. 'An educated woman,' Ursula agreed.”

“She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.”

“Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.”

“If you don't have a unique voice, then you're not really a writer.”