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"However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned."
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Exlpore more Writing quotes
"Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal."
"You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people from people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you've observed in the world."
"As often I have been a science fiction writer writing science fiction for the community of science fiction readers, I am also, for good or ill, an American writing American literature to an American audience. Most fundamentally, though, I am a human being writing human literature to a human audience."
"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."
"I'd be somewhat of a lousy writer if I didn't know what to say."
"A true piece of writing sets you free."
"A writer travels through the heart again and again to express the beauty of its contents."
"The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine."
Explore more quotes by Helen Dunmore
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint."
"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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