Rose Tremain quotes

Life is not a dress rehearsal. (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.

Rose Tremain

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

Rose Tremain

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

Rose Tremain

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Rose Tremain

I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important.

Rose Tremain

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.

Rose Tremain

Life should be embraced like a lover.

Rose Tremain

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.

Rose Tremain

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.

Rose Tremain

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel. (Rose Tremain)

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

Rose Tremain

And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to make her irreplaceable.

Rose Tremain

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.

Rose Tremain

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

Rose Tremain

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

Rose Tremain

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.

Rose Tremain

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.

Rose Tremain

Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know.' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.

Rose Tremain

Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.

Rose Tremain

There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existence is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, which is free. (Rose Tremain)

The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for what they are and then alter them.

Rose Tremain

Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.

Rose Tremain

Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted "first readers".

Rose Tremain

Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

Rose Tremain