ALAN GARNER

I've 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.

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.'

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

... 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.

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

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.

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