Helen Dunmore Quotes

38 quotes in 545 categories

• Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.
• 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…
• A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.
• 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,…
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.
• 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…
• I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the…
• 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…
• I was always influenced by language.
• A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
• 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…
• Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away.
• 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…
• Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.
• 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…
• I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay.
• If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

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