Top 36 Kate Grenville Quotes
#1. Ain't nothing in this world just for the taking...A man got to pay a fair price for taking...Matter of give a little, take a little.
Kate Grenville
#2. I've always had a problem with conventional punctuation of dialogue because it does seem to me to set it off too much from the narrative. I mean, in life, things don't stop while somebody says something, and then stuff starts up again; it's all happening at once.
Kate Grenville
#3. I'm a great believer in the experiential theory of writing.
Kate Grenville
#4. A big book is a hard thing to manage - I find the computer makes it easier to keep it in order, and to keep the old drafts (which I sometimes go back to) without drowning in paper.
Kate Grenville
#5. Words are a pretty blunt instrument. There's always going to be slippage between the words and the infinite complexities of a thought. As a writer, I find that frustrating, but as a social animal, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Kate Grenville
#6. All this, grassy paddock, cows, trees - he had thought it was Nature. But now he could see that that was ignorance, or lack of imagination. It was not Nature. It was actually property.
Kate Grenville
#7. I love to write a book out of questions; in fact, I think it's the only way my writing can operate, if there's something I don't understand.
Kate Grenville
#8. I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.
Kate Grenville
#9. I do feel as if ... Look, I think I'm a very kind of ordinary person, and it seems to me that things that are of interest to me will probably be of interest to other people. I'm not exceptional; I don't have exceptional thoughts.
Kate Grenville
#11. I don't think the physical object of a book has any sacred quality, so in principle I think ebooks are great - just another way for stories and story-tellers to connect.
Kate Grenville
#12. This place had been here long before him. It would go on sighing and breathing and being itself after he had gone, the land lapping on and on, watching, waiting, getting on with its own life.
Kate Grenville
#13. Ebooks have many advantages - publishers don't have to make guesses about how many books to print, books need never go "out of print", and hard-to-find books can be easily available. So far, the only limitation seems to be finding a way for the writer to be paid.
Kate Grenville
#14. 'The Secret River' began because, at the age of 50, I suddenly realised I knew nothing about how my own family had got its foothold in Australia.
Kate Grenville
#15. The idea of perfection can be a tyrant you should overthrow, to gain your freedom.
Kate Grenville
#16. I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn't be prosaic.
Kate Grenville
#17. One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.
Kate Grenville
#18. Until a thing was seen, could it be said to exist? And if his eye through the telescope were the one that brought a certain star into existence, did not that make him a creator?
Kate Grenville
#19. Nothing much interested me other than playing with language and telling stories and doing something with the wonders of the world around me.
Kate Grenville
#20. You were alive for such a short time and then you went back into the great silence. The only ones who didn't vanish were the artists. While you were reading their words and looking at their pictures they were still alive, and you shared some of their life too.
Kate Grenville
#21. Until you could put yourself at some point beyond your own world, looking back at it, you would never see how everything worked together.
Kate Grenville
#22. it crossed Farren's mind that although death seemed big, life was even bigger
Kate Grenville
#23. I think with all my books, language has been their subject as much as anything else. Language can elide or displace or sideline whole groups of people. You can't necessarily change the way language is used, but if it becomes something you're conscious of ... that gives you a certain power over it.
Kate Grenville
#24. I think we all waste a lot of time measuring ourselves up against impossible standards in lots of ways. We need to learn a few things, one of which being that physical beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, including a lot that the women's magazines have never even thought of.
Kate Grenville
#25. How short a time a person had to be alive, he thought. How long to be dead.
Kate Grenville
#26. The self that had laughed and raised his glass and shouted out the words with the others seemed to him now to be foolishly, dangerously, disastrously innocent.
Kate Grenville
#27. The dragons of twentieth-century life are ignorance, incompetence, slackness and disloyalty, she said.
Kate Grenville
#28. When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in 'Bearded Ladies' are a little bit experimental.
Kate Grenville
#29. Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation.
Kate Grenville
#30. A culture produces ideas which are being explored, which of interest to that culture at that moment. And I think one of the things a writer can do is to take those ideas and go a bit further with them.
Kate Grenville
#31. Some kinds of order were too vast for a human to know. But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.
Kate Grenville
#32. Each language has its own take on the world. That's why a translation can never be absolutely exact, and therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.
Kate Grenville
#33. Australia lives with a strange contradiction - our national image of ourselves is one of the Outback, and yet nearly all us live in big cities. Move outside the coastal fringe, and Australia can feel like a foreign country.
Kate Grenville
#34. He had seen God in the night sky long before he understood its patterns.
Kate Grenville
#35. For years I've wanted to write about the Australian countryside, but, like most Australians, I've only got a tourist's knowledge of it. I thought that if I disobeyed that basic rule of writing - write about what you know - I'd write a thin and inauthentic book.
Kate Grenville
#36. What an astonishing thing, that her praise filled his heart.
Kate Grenville
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