Alan Garner
Alan Garner
Alan Garner OBEis an English novelist best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. Much of his work is firmly rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth17 October 1934
writing simple world
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.
block thinking waiting
... 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.
jobs stories levels
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.
stress people care
Hitting the gym to release stress is not nearly as effective as hitting the people that cause the stress to begin with.
coward cop metaphor
I'll buy metaphor, but simile's a cop-out used by scaredycats who won't commit to anything. Simile's for cowards.
writing ifs
If you are going to write, nothing will stop you, and if you are not going to write, nothing will make you.
trying force ive-learned
Ive learned never to try and force words to come.
osmosis space long
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.
writing stories research
I love research so much that I do an enormous amount; it helps put off the moment of starting to write the story.
book
I learnt that I must never finish a book with nothing else to do.
men self grandfather
My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.
rooms chairs written
Everything I have ever written has been in the same chair, in the same room.
cities crowds biomass
I loathe crowds. I especially dont like cities. A city involves biomass. And biomass gets to me.
attitude children book
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.