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"I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately."
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"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."

"I read a lot, but I read about the areas that I'm interested in."

"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second."

"All over the country, they're reading about me, and the story doesn't center on me being gay. It's just about a gay person who is doing his job."

"What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?"

"Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic."

"Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

"I probably read 100 times more than I write, but that way when I move my characters through it, I know."

"And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing."
Explore more quotes by Helen Dunmore

"Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear."

"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 covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me."

"My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint."

"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, our intimates."

"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 felt like entering a tradition."

"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 there."

"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 all."
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