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"I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important."
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"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done."

"Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing."

"Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it."

"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."
Explore more quotes by 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."

"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'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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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