Alan Garner Quotes

#1. She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.

Alan Garner

#2. Everything I have ever written has been in the same chair, in the same room.

Alan Garner

#3. The walls were shedding their texture and taking another in the pouncing feathers. Gwyn

Alan Garner

#4. 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.

Alan Garner

#5. 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.

Alan Garner

#6. 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.

Alan Garner

#7. When a monkey nibbles on a weenis, it's funny in any language.

Alan Garner

#8. The thing that I was brought up to prize above everything else is the intellect. There is no problem that the intellect cannot solve, but it never had an original thought. Originality is the realm of the unconscious.

Alan Garner

#9. I love research so much that I do an enormous amount; it helps put off the moment of starting to write the story.

Alan Garner

#10. The deed is nothing. It is the thought that breeds fear; and we achieve little by lingering.

Alan Garner

#11. Possessive parents rarely live long enough to see the fruits of their selfishness.

Alan Garner

#12. 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.

Alan Garner

#13. If you are going to write, nothing will stop you, and if you are not going to write, nothing will make you.

Alan Garner

#14. I wanted us to have a holiday, not a ruddy breakdown.

Alan Garner

#15. My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.

Alan Garner

#16. Hitting the gym to release stress is not nearly as effective as hitting the people that cause the stress to begin with.

Alan Garner

#17. 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.'

Alan Garner

#18. I wish Monkeys could Skype. Maybe one day.

Alan Garner

#19. But what can we do?" said Susan.
"Think, and hope," said Cadellin.
"I would rather seek and find," said Uthecar.

Alan Garner

#20. I loathe crowds. I especially don't like cities. A city involves biomass. And biomass gets to me.

Alan Garner

#21. Im not supposed to be within two hundred feet of a school or a Chuck E. Cheese.

Alan Garner

#22. As far as the world was concerned, from 1979 to 1996, I didn't publish any original material; it just wasn't there.

Alan Garner

#23. My primary tongue, I would call North-West Mercian.

Alan Garner

#24. The more I learn, the more I am convinced that there are no original stories. On several occasions I have "invented" an incident, and then come across it in an obscure fragment of Hebridean lore, orally collected, and privately printed, a hundred years ago.

Alan Garner

#25. 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.

Alan Garner

#26. 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.

Alan Garner

#27. Oh, drop dead, you miserable cow.

Alan Garner

#28. 'They don't know what it's like. Inside. For them it's only fun, even though I tell them it isn't. You see I don't delete. Anything. Ever.

Alan Garner

#29. I learnt that I must never finish a book with nothing else to do.

Alan Garner

#30. The wood lay still. The air throbbed with insects, and flies hovered and disappeared and hovered. Meadowsweet grew in a mist of flowers, and the sun glinted on the threads of caterpillars which hung from the trees as thick as rain. "By," said Gwyn, "there's axiomatic.

Alan Garner

#31. 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.

Alan Garner

#32. I'll buy metaphor, but simile's a cop-out used by scaredycats who won't commit to anything. Simile's for cowards.

Alan Garner

#33. I've learned never to try and force words to come.

Alan Garner