"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."

Writing, First, Poems, Tradition

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"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."

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"Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists."

Sara Sheridan, Scottish Author

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"A writer is like a stick of rock - the words go right through."

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"For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it."

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"Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes."

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"I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show."

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"Writers have a well-deserved reputation for being eccentric. Everything you've heard is true."

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"Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play."

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"Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real."

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"My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire."

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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."

Poetry

"Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book."

Hope

"I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately."

Reading

"To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation."

History

"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."

Time

"Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present."

Past

"I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing."

Influence

"If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us."

Past

"It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed."

Politics

"A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into."

Writing