Helen Dunmore Quotes
-
If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.
→ -
As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates.
→ -
Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.
→ -
When you are young you don't always realise how full of doubts everybody is.
→ -
Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away.
→ -
I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay.
→ -
I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.
→ -
Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book.
→ -
I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.
→ -
Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country.
→ -
To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation.
→ -
I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.
→ -
I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me.
→ -
A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.
→ -
Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
→ -
Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.
→ -
Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.
→ -
The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.
→ -
However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.
→ -
The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.
→ -
However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.
→ -
I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.
→ -
A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
→ -
In a world without air all you breathe is adventure!
→ -
For you where never my blood sister so no more shall I call you little sister
→ -
Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.
→ -
It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.
→ -
Once one habit peels away the others follow it. You have to hold on, or the next thing you'll find yourself parading down the street in your nightdress. Habit is everything.
→ -
I was always influenced by language.
→ -
If the garden of Eden really exists it does so moment by moment, fragmented and tough, cropping up like a fan of buddleia high up in the gutter of a deserted warehouse, or in a heap of frozen cabbages becoming luminous in the reflected light of roadside snow.
→
Related Authors
-
Paul Kingsnorth Writer -
Jessie Burton Author -
Eoin Colfer Author -
Howard Jacobson Author -
Kate Atkinson Writer -
Andrea Levy Author -
Kate Grenville Author -
Imtiaz Dharker Poet -
Maggie O'Farrell Author -
David Almond Author -
Simon Armitage Poet -
Kathryn Lasky Author -
Ali Smith Writer -
Rose Tremain Author -
Linda Grant Novelist -
Diana Athill Editor -
Christos Tsiolkas Author -
Margaret Drabble Novelist -
Pat Barker Writer -
Damon Galgut Playwright