Rose Tremain Quotes & Sayings

I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland. — Rose Tremain

Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak. — Rose Tremain

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 ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways. — Rose Tremain

Human society is ninety percent muck that won't disperse to the appropriate location that's why I chose the profession of plumber. — Rose Tremain

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female. — Rose Tremain

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 and the necessary time for the initial research. — Rose Tremain

River on the ferry, Billy swam beside it, and Harriet remembered the donkey and the donkey cart of her first — Rose Tremain

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it. — Rose Tremain

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 your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being. — Rose Tremain

Acceptance, she thinks, is the harshest lesson life teaches and the one most important to learn. — Rose Tremain

I am not in search of friends and confidences. I'm concentrating on being. I live each hour, one by one. My mind is quiet and still. I am no longer waiting for time to pass — Rose Tremain

Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings. — Rose Tremain

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 picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along. — Rose Tremain

What mattered was writing it: the act of words. — Rose Tremain

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all. — Rose Tremain

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write. — Rose Tremain

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 your finite powers can enable it to be. — Rose Tremain

Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted 'first readers.' — Rose Tremain

There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existance is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, witch is free. — Rose Tremain

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 understanding of the world and write about that. — Rose Tremain

Lev,' said Ruby, 'when I was younger, I always told people the things I thought they wanted to hear. But I don't do that anymore. It's a cruel thing to do. So I can't say now that you will be free of it ( grief) and move on, because I just don't know the answer. — Rose Tremain

I'm not very interested in charting a day-to-day familiar reality. I'm always looking for territory in which to explore the BIG subjects, the life-or-death stories. — Rose Tremain

Life should be embraced like a lover. — Rose Tremain

Felt astonishment at the idea of that much leisure that much spare cash flying away into bottles and vials. — Rose Tremain

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it. — Rose Tremain

How could such a picture be in a national newspaper The model had ridiculous breasts the size of pumpkins and lips fat and wet and all that she was wearing was a spangled G-string. — Rose Tremain

Together we shall see what is in this great kingdom of Denmark, and on this journey you will put from you all the sufferings of recent years and regain your joy in the world. — Rose Tremain

Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein. — Rose Tremain

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. — Rose Tremain

He'd never seen a rain quite like this so gentle that it seemed barely to fall yet slowly laid its shine on the bay leaves and hydrangea flowers ... — Rose Tremain

Inevitably we make a small world in the midst of a big one. For a small world is all we know how to make.'p46 — Rose Tremain

And it is silence that she hears, the silence of lost years that have no voice left in them. — Rose Tremain

Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes. — Rose Tremain

Life is not a dress rehearsal. — Rose Tremain

When the news of the Scottish find reached Kaniere, forty or fifty miners who had been toiling there for weeks for poor returns decided to cut their losses, buy new licences and make for Kokatahi. In the time that it took them to get to the warden's office at Hokitika and back, the Scottish strike had been talked up into a 'homeward bounder': a discovery so huge that it would change men's lives at a stroke and enable them to return home as rich men. They came up the river in pairs and groups. They — Rose Tremain

There's the trick: to find the way - whether forwards or back - to what we long to be. — Rose Tremain

Kept falling in and out of it [sleep] like out of a boat or a tipping hammock. — Rose Tremain

My name is Lev," said Lev.
"My name is Lydia," said the woman. And they shook hands, Lev's hand holding the scrunched-up kerchief and Lydia's hand rough with salt and smelling of egg, and then Lev asked, "What are you planning to do in En gland?" and Lydia said, "I have some interviews in London for jobs as a translator."
"That sounds promising."
"I hope so. I was a teacher of English at School 237 in Yarbl, so my language is very colloquial."
Lev looked at Lydia. It wasn't difficult to imagine her standing in front of a class and writing words on a blackboard. He said, "I wonder why you're leaving our country when you had a good job at School 237 in Yarbl?"
"Well," said Lydia, "I became very tired of the view from my window. Every day, summer and winter, I looked out at the schoolyard and the high fence and the apartment block beyond, and I began to imagine I would die seeing these things, and I didn't want this. I expect you understand what I mean? — Rose Tremain

I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important. — Rose Tremain

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 sufficient to make her irreplaceable. — Rose Tremain

He appears to Paul like an old man, choking up with half-remembered things, as though there were a great struggle going on inside him to find, in among all that was half-remembered, those moments which had been absolute and true. — Rose Tremain

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 empty space in my head - is barely formed yet. — Rose Tremain

When you're old nobody touches you nobody listens to you - not in this bloody country.so that's what I do. I touch and I listen. — Rose Tremain

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel. — Rose Tremain

We may avoid shame if we choose, for shame seldom takes us unawares but has its warning cry, and we can hear that cry as clearly as we can hear the coming of the north wind ... The man lying in the mud hadn't heard the coming of the north wind. — Rose Tremain

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, the things which remain mysterious or unexplained have always drawn me to include them in any scheme for a novel. — Rose Tremain

Music is so important in a human life. It finds a space inside us that nothing else touches.' Gustav — Rose Tremain

The Koran teaches that deeds of unselfish kindness will be rewarded in heaven. I've given you precious food and for this unselfishness I will find reward. But now I shall go further. I am going to give you work. — Rose Tremain

I did have a beautiful life. It ended early, that's all. — Rose Tremain

I have been held in an embrace so strong by the journey that I find I have relinquished the will to arrive. — Rose Tremain

HE felt so tired that he felt almost like lying down there where he was in the warm sunshine just waiting until someone showed up but then he thought he did not know long a day was a summer day in England and how soon afternoon and evening would arrive and he didn't want to find himself on the street when it got dark. — Rose Tremain

We have to become the people we always should have been. — Rose Tremain

The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for what they are and then alter them. — Rose Tremain