Top 29 Quotes & Sayings by Alan Garner

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English novelist Alan Garner.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Alan Garner is an English novelist best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. Much of his work is 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.

English - Novelist | Born: October 17, 1934

Source: Wikipedia

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

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 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

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

Alan Garner

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

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

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

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 primary tongue, I would call North-West Mercian.

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

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

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

Alan Garner

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

Alan Garner

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

Alan Garner

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.

Alan Garner

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

Alan Garner

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

... 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

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

Alan Garner

Ive learned never to try and force words to come.

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

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

Alan Garner

I wish Monkeys could Skype. Maybe one day.

Alan Garner

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

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

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

Alan Garner