Alan Garner Quotes

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

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

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

- 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

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

- 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

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

- 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