Quotes by Alan Garner

About Alan Garner:

Alan Garner is an English novelist best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. 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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I hope there isn't. I'm for uncertainty. As soon as you think you know, you're done for. You don't listen and you can't hear. If you're certain of anything, you shut the door on the possibility of revelation, of discovery. You can think. You can beli...

Alan Garner

Why are you here?" "To fetch the woman I cut from the veil of the rock." “Why did you cut?" "To send her spirit out, so that she would come to make the child, for me to teach to dance and sing and dream, to free the beasts within the rock to fill t...

Alan Garner

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Garner

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

Alan Garner

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

Alan Garner

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

Alan Garner

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

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

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

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

Alan Garner

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

Alan Garner

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

Alan Garner

Author Bio

  • NameAlan Garner
  • DescriptionEnglish fiction writer and folklorist
  • BornOctober 17, 1934
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Children's Writer
  • WorksThe Weirdstone Of Brisingamen; The Moon Of Gomrath; Elidor; The Owl Service
  • AwardsOfficer Of The Order Of The British Empire