Alan Garner Quotes
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When you start, the world of publishing seems like a great cathedral citadel of talent, resisting attempts to let you inside. It isn't like that at all. It may be more difficult now, and take longer than when I started to write, but there's a great, empty warehouse out there looking for simple talent.
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She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.
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It's where I keep all my things. Get a lot of compliments on this. Plus it's not a purse, it's called a satchel. Indiana Jones wears one.
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I'll buy metaphor, but simile's a cop-out used by scaredycats who won't commit to anything. Simile's for cowards.
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... I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of "writer's block". I was more inclined to think of it as "writer's impatience", and to follow Arthur Koestler's dictum: "Soak; and wait.
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When a monkey nibbles on a weenis, it's funny in any language.
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Possessive parents rarely live long enough to see the fruits of their selfishness.
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If you are going to write, nothing will stop you, and if you are not going to write, nothing will make you.
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Hitting the gym to release stress is not nearly as effective as hitting the people that cause the stress to begin with.
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My background is deep and set in deep time, and in a narrow space, oral traditions going back a long, long time, which I inherited by osmosis.
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As far as the world was concerned, from 1979 to 1996, I didn't publish any original material; it just wasn't there.
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My primary tongue, I would call North-West Mercian.
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The job of a storyteller is to speak the truth. But what we feel most deeply can’t be spoken in words alone. At this level, only images connect. And here, story becomes symbol; symbol is myth. And myth is truth.
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I don't think I've ever frightened myself before when writing, but there were areas where there was terror, as though I was looking into somewhere that I didn't know existed before, and it frightened me.
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I wish Monkeys could Skype. Maybe one day.
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I learnt that I must never finish a book with nothing else to do.
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Im not supposed to be within two hundred feet of a school or a Chuck E. Cheese.
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My attitude is that if anybody of any age wants to read a book, let them, but I do think that no child would want to read 'Boneland.'
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My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.
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I've learned never to try and force words to come.
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My mother read nursery rhymes to me, and my grandmother told me folk stories, but as a child I had no interest in writing whatsoever.
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I loathe crowds. I especially don't like cities. A city involves biomass. And biomass gets to me.
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My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.
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Everything I have ever written has been in the same chair, in the same room.