top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more History quotes
"They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion."
"There was something melancholic about that symbol of their nation's promise of freedom, a bell with a chipped mouth and cleft body."
"This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors."
"An important part of what the state does is preserving its history."
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."
"I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel."
"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."
bottom of page