Rose Tremain Quotes

24 quotes in 423 categories

• Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.
• Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is…
• The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.
• Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know.' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your…
• At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs…
• The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.
• I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.
• Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself…
• A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.
• When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait, and obey." Along with…
• Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as…
• So history is fertile territory for me and I think I could feel happy with any period of history, provided I had the right sources…
• When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.
• There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existence is paid for in some way, except for that one…
• Life is not a dress rehearsal.
• And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected…
• In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.
• Perhaps, more importantly, I think that most human beings realise only a fraction of the true potential of their minds, so the spiritual or mystical,…
• Life should be embraced like a lover.
• I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole…

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