Writer Quotes by Maggie O'Farrell

8 Writer quotes by Maggie O'Farrell

All Writer quotes Maggie O'Farrell’s page

O'Farrell’s lyrical, character‑driven style is captured in eight succinct reflections, offering a quick peek at her approach to the writer’s art.

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I think it's dangerous to have lots of time on your hands as a writer. Time to pursue every little alleyway, to…

Maggie O'Farrell

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In the course of writing a book I'll produce loads of pieces of paper to help the novel itself. Diagrams, charts, family…

Maggie O'Farrell

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The key thing in my becoming a writer was going on a Arvon Foundation residential writing course. I took with me a…

Maggie O'Farrell

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For a while I used to listen to those whispers about babies costing you books, and Cyril Connolly's loathsome quote that "There…

Maggie O'Farrell

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I don't want to be influenced as to what I write in the next book, to hear those voices in my head…

Maggie O'Farrell

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I try not to be too precious about my writing, and I try to be willing to walk away from it for…

Maggie O'Farrell

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The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende says there's no such thing as writer's block, you just need to live a bit more. I…

Maggie O'Farrell

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You learn so much with each book, but it's what you teach yourself by writing your own books and by reading good…

Maggie O'Farrell

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More by Maggie O'Farrell

She wanted to say, no. She wanted to say, I have a son, there is a child, this cannot happen. Because you know that…

Maggie O'Farrell

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Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

Maggie O'Farrell

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I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in cushioning your insecurities with a system of belief that tells you 'Don't worry. This may…

Maggie O'Farrell

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I met a retired police detective. And he said to me that the interesting thing about heatwaves, from a police perspective, is that the…

Maggie O'Farrell

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While I was writing the book, one of my children was diagnosed with dyslexia. Dyslexia is a very tiny word for a wide-ranging neurological…

Maggie O'Farrell

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“Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager?”

Maggie O'Farrell

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I think it's dangerous to have lots of time on your hands as a writer. Time to pursue every little alleyway, to follow every…

Maggie O'Farrell

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I think all families have these secrets, and it's sometimes the strangest things that bring them out. That was part of my interest in…

Maggie O'Farrell

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My husband, William Sutcliffe, the writer, is my first reader and in many ways my most important. That initial reading of the manuscript is…

Maggie O'Farrell

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She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

Maggie O'Farrell

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“That's because they're of the past. All photos of the past look melancholy and wistful precisely because they capture something that's gone.”

Maggie O'Farrell

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We always planned to move back to the Republic but it never happened, I'm not sure why. My dad is one of those immigrants…

Maggie O'Farrell

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I was interested in the ripples of feminism passing through Britain and Ireland in the mid-Seventies - how the reverberations of the feminist political…

Maggie O'Farrell

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Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost…

Maggie O'Farrell

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In the first night of the Arvon Foundation course, Elspeth Barker said something about the newspaper along the lines of - and I'm paraphrasing…

Maggie O'Farrell

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