Alan Garner Quotes

I would be miserable if I went to bed without having written 1,000 words about something.

My best writing has to do with an internal process that I'm working out unconsciously and put into my characters.

I write, I write, I always write.

Being a writer was never a choice, it was an irresistible compulsion.

Sometimes I've called writing a disease. If so, I'm glad that it caught me.

Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.

I feel my writing comes from a desire to... well, it's motivated by many things, but it's inherently a contradiction in that I'm writing for myself, and it's a very interior journey. On the other hand, I feel that writers do make that interior journey out of a desire to connect.

It's hard for me to feel bad when I'm writing well.

I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.

When you're a writer and something difficult happens to you, one of the things involved in that is this emergence of narrative potential. And there's then a kind of self-consciousness about telling a story in which you suffered.

The spiritual writing of the song is where you're chosen as a vehicle, and it comes from something up above. You don't move; it writes itself. It's very spooky, but that's happened to me just a few times.

I read a quote to the effect that we are always writing about ourselves no matter what we're doing. That may be so.

When I am writing alone I try to just write for myself without thinking, like, this will go on a record.

People who are artists professionally are not artists because they want to be artists; they have to be artists. They're compelled to get that creativity out and to share that with others.

I really like writing poetry and lyrics because it's one thing where I give up control. I don't feel like I need to be in control of it. I just sort of let it happen, and then I know when it's done. I know when it's finished.

I write a lot when I'm feeling bummed, but other times, you get locked in, and it's totally personal. If you're really low and writing, you're not thinking about anybody at all.

In my personal life, dark material is kind of an emptying out - it leaves more room for light. If I'm writing a particularly awful scene, something is released in the process.

I don't outline. I sit down to write, and I take the ride. If something starts to not feel right, I go back to the last place that felt like jazz to me.

My identity is based around being a writer. I can't not write. It's a compulsion.

I just write about what makes me sad, and then when I write, I hear myself. It's like therapy, where I write something sad and then I make it happier or hopeful.

I don't write thinking directly about what I'm feeling, usually. I just let myself write whatever comes out without it necessarily being directly a translation of what I'm aware that I'm feeling, you know?

When you're writing, I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. You're dealing with emotions and thoughts that are native to you. So that probably winds up in your characters.

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

I usually am thinking about my next book the second I put the last dot on the previous one that I turn in.

Hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.