Alan Garner Quotations

... 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Ive learned never to try and force words to come.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 wish Monkeys could Skype. Maybe one day.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

As far as the world was concerned, from 1979 to 1996, I didn't publish any original material; it just wasn't there.

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