Rose Tremain
6 quotes
Biography
Dame Rosemary Jane Tremain is an English novelist, short story writer, and former Chancellor of the University of East Anglia. She has been the recipient of many prizes for her writing, including the Giles Cooper Award (1984), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1992), the Whitbread Award (1999) and the Orange Prize (2008).
"In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it."
"I think, on a , what I’d really appreciate are long books: books as day-by-day companions, to combat loneliness and fear. We have some brilliant contemporary authors who write on the big canvas, yet I feel that desert-island panic might be better combated by novels set in the past, preferably by long-dead authors who had never experienced central heating or modern dentistry. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Balzac’s and Trollope’s (all with vibrant and courageous female protagonists, to spur me on to valour and fortitude) would be among my front runners. Reading contemporary novels would remind me, hour after hour, of the world I’d lost and might never regain. Tolstoy, on the other hand, reveals to me a universe I may never manage to understand in its entirety, so when I get to the end, I can happily start at the beginning again."
"Give history to children in the form of lists of dates or lumps of data and they won’t respond to it at all, but give them an image King Charles II, say, , or a defeated Napoleon staring out at an empty ocean from the cliffs of ) and this could be something which might move and inspire them."
"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."
"There's the trick: to find the way - whether forwards or back - to what we long to be."
"Life is not a dress rehearsal."