Jane Gardam Quotes & Sayings

For years, there was no man in the house when my husband was off on law cases in the Far East. Without writing, I would have been bored and unfaithful, maybe both, and the children would have been hideously over-protected. — Jane Gardam

In modern novels, there is no one I want to copy. My style 'is a poor thing, but it is my own.' — Jane Gardam

I think the most dangerous influence for a young writer is to be treated with cynicism or discouragement. — Jane Gardam

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed. — Jane Gardam

Mum was a tremendous Anglo-Catholic. Very impressive, actually. She made me go to church for years - I still don't want to because of that. — Jane Gardam

I just knew I would be a writer. It just seemed the only sensible thing to do. — Jane Gardam

Laywers, I suppose, were children once. — Jane Gardam

His colleagues at the Bar called him Filth, but not out of irony. It was because he was considered to be the source of the old joke, Failed In London Try Hong Kong. It was said that he had fled the London Bar, very young, very poor, on a sudden whim just after the War, and had done magnificently well in Hong Kong from the start. Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit.
Filth in fact was no great maker of jokes, was not at all modest about his work and seldom, except in great extremity, went in for whims. He was loved, however, admired, laughed at kindly and still much discussed many years after retirement. — Jane Gardam

The landing stage stood on its high crooked stilts with only one person watching the boat disappear round the bend of the river - a girl of twelve called Ada, the wet-nurse's eldest child. As — Jane Gardam

I was nearly 40 when I started. I had no fear that I wasn't going to write. I knew it was just delayed. Then, my goodness, I never stopped. — Jane Gardam

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder. — Jane Gardam

The complexion of a novelist is seldom rosy (Paul Bailey once announced to a heavy-hearted audience of novelists at PEN that we have always been an ugly tribe). We are engaged in indoor activity, haemorrhoidal, prone to chillblains, poor of circulation. — Jane Gardam

But there's time yet. The old women of the tribe have almost always been the wiser. If they keep their marbles long enough. Old men forget--or tend to reminisce, and reminisce falsely and sententiously as a rule. We are often very silly in our middle years but we tend to improve — Jane Gardam

If you've not been loved as a child, you don't know how to love a child. — Jane Gardam

If I've got one thing that I really believe about fiction and life, it's that there are no minor characters. — Jane Gardam

When I was young and the empire was beginning to disintegrate, the idea was absolutely unbelievable, particularly to children who'd been taught that the sun never set ... that's what all my books are about, the end of empire. — Jane Gardam

I hate the idea of sequels. I think you should be able to do it in one book. — Jane Gardam

What I don't want is to be called an octogenarian. I saw 'Octogenarian Jane Gardam' and I thought 'Blow me!' I mean, I am, but that's not the point."

(Inteview, The Guardian, 8 January 2011) — Jane Gardam

I discovered that writing was very nice indeed when I was very young, and I never changed. I don't think my style has changed very much at all - though I hope what I say is a bit more interesting. It's about getting to know a character and loving them, I think. — Jane Gardam

Only a great genius like the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell can be mother, wife and novelist without solitude. I couldn't write until my youngest child went to school, and then I began - the first morning - and I've never stopped. — Jane Gardam

I started to write as a child as soon as I could read, or even before, when my mother read me Beatrix Potter at bedtime. Writing seemed to me to be the only sensible way to live and be happy. — Jane Gardam

English country life is more like Chekhov than 'The Archers' or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared. — Jane Gardam

I can't write the same book over and over again ... let it go, once it's gone! — Jane Gardam

Jane Austen we know never let two men converse alone in any novel because what they said would be unknown to her. — Jane Gardam

She wanted to take his hand. Her hardest task now as she grew older in the Ministry was to deal with her longing to be touched - hugged, stroked by anyone, any human being - a friend, a lover, a child or even (and here she scented danger) a servant. Of either sex. She prayed about it, asking that God's encircling arms would bring comfort. They did not — Jane Gardam

I gave myself to my children. It happens to some women. — Jane Gardam

Present us with a silver cup for something when you're a filthy rich lawyer, I dare say? Yes. You'll be a lawyer. Magnificent memory. Sense of logic, no imagination and no brains. — Jane Gardam

Amy planted a glass of brandy beside the bride's cornflakes. — Jane Gardam

Somewhere inside we do know everything about ourselves. There is no real forgetting. Perhaps we know somewhere, too, about all there is to come. — Jane Gardam

I longed from a tiny child to get away on my own. When I was five, I walked out along the sands from Redcar, nearly all the way to Hartlepool. — Jane Gardam

The best novel I wrote was one called 'Crusoe's Daughter,' which never won any prizes. But I was getting somewhere in that. I'm not sure I have in any of the others. — Jane Gardam

So the years passed and everyone grew old and Nell's husband died and Hilda grew to be a large, angry sort of woman very high up in local government. When Nell was eighty-four Hilda retired and they went to live at a sea-side place where Hilda had had meaningful holidays during the menopause with a woman called Audrey, now dead. — Jane Gardam

I knew I had a lot to say. Not politically - politics have always confused me - but perhaps spiritually. — Jane Gardam

All my life I have felt events to be the result of my own sins. — Jane Gardam

For years of our lives the days pass waywardly, featureless, without meaning, without particular happiness or unhappiness. Then, like turning over a tapestry when you have only known the back of it, there is spread the pattern. — Jane Gardam