Alan Garner Quotes

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

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.

I wish Monkeys could Skype. Maybe one day.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I loathe crowds. I especially dont like cities. A city involves biomass. And biomass gets to me.

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

Ive learned never to try and force words to come.

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

... 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.

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