Maggie O'Farrell Quotes

Quotes about:

• Always, at the end of every book, there are things you will be unsatisfied with, and still more things that later on you will realize were not right. But mistakes are part of what a book is. That itchy, dissatisfied feeling at the end of a novel is useful. It's what keeps you writing and gets you writing the next one. It's what keeps you learning.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Mistake, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in cushioning your insecurities with a system of belief that tells you 'Don't worry. This may be your life but you're not in control. There is something or someone looking out for you -- it's already organised.' It's all chance and choice, which is far more frightening.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Believe, Fate, Worry

  7 Copy quote

• I think it was Rose Macaulay who said, "A house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived."

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Thinking, Rose, House

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Years, Two, People

  Maggie O'Farrell (2008). “The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox”, p.26, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• What are you supposed to do with all the love you have for somebody if that person is no longer there? What happens to all that leftover love? Do you suppress it? Do you ignore it? Are you supposed to give it to someone else?

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Love You, Giving, Persons

  4 Copy quote

• Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Sea, Tree, Stories

  Maggie O'Farrell (2010). “The Hand That First Held Mine”, p.3, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• Gretta sits herself down at the table. Robert has arranged everything she needs: a plate, a knife, a bowl with a spoon, a pat of butter, a jar of jam. It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Kindness, Knives, Small Acts

  Maggie O'Farrell (2013). “Instructions for a Heatwave”, p.14, Hachette UK

  5 Copy quote

• Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Terrible, Happens, Terrible Things

  Maggie O'Farrell (2009). “After You'd Gone”, p.18, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

• You learn so much with each book, but it's what you teach yourself by writing your own books and by reading good books written by other people - that's the key. You don't want to worry too much about other people's responses to your work, not during the writing and not after. You just need to read and write, and keep going.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Reading, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Motherhood is all-encompassing, and in a way, as the mother, you're the star of the household.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Mother, Motherhood

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Despite being from Ireland, I've always avoided writing about it, for two reasons. For a very small country, Ireland has produced an astonishing number of literary geniuses, and at some level I probably never felt, having left as a toddler, that I had the right to try and add my voice. That's part of it. But I also didn't want to write something that was the equivalent of the Irish theme pub. You find them all over the world. The idea of producing a novel that might replicate that type of ersatz really set my teeth on edge.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Country, Writing, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Spending a lot of time away from home was strange. My parents visited me, obviously, but I was in hospital a lot, alone. And then when my health had improved a bit and I was in a sick-bed in the house, with the life of the house going on around me, that was very vivid for me. I always think that's a bit like the position of a novelist in a novel, going through drafts: there but not there, one remove from reality.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Home, Reality, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• As other authors have realized, heat can have a strange effect on us, can cause odd chemical reactions in the brain. Heat can bring out secrets; it can change people's personalities.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Personality, Brain, Secret

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I always had the urge to write. Not in the sense of wanting to be a writer, but just writing things down, getting words on a page. Graphomania, it's called. I've always had a definite love of stationary products - I used to spend all my pocket-money on pens and notepads. I still do, in a way.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Writing, Pens

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• My husband, William Sutcliffe, the writer, is my first reader and in many ways my most important. That initial reading of the manuscript is crucial and irreplaceable and you want them to approach it as someone in a bookshop might, not knowing much about it. So I've got into this pattern of not telling Will anything about the book I'm working on. He often knows nothing about the book I'm working on at all until I give him the whole manuscript and ask him to read it. The book I'm working on at the moment he knows nothing about. No one does.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Husband, Book, Reading

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• For a while I used to listen to those whispers about babies costing you books, and Cyril Connolly's loathsome quote that "There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall." But it's rubbish. Absolute rubbish. A huge amount of your work is done when you're not at your desk. Knotty problems that you need your unconscious to solve. So it can be helpful to walk away and focus on other things and it can be helpful to be a bit harassed in your daily life, to be hungry for time to write.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Baby, Art, Book

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• In the course of writing a book I'll produce loads of pieces of paper to help the novel itself. Diagrams, charts, family trees. And at the end of each book I'll pack it all away. It takes me a while to do it - it's like a relationship that way; there's a period of letting - go, of grief, in a way - but then I box it up, label it, and put it in the attic.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Grief, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• As you'll know yourself, there are these moments when you're writing a book when one remark or moment will pull everything together and you'll think, "That's it. I've got what I need."

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• She wanted to say, no. She wanted to say, I have a son, there is a child, this cannot happen. Because you know that no one will ever love them like you do. You know that no one will look after them like you do. You know that it's an impossibility, it's unthinkable that you could be taken away, that you will have to leave them behind.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Children, Taken, Son

  4 Copy quote

• She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Long, Way, His Smile

  7 Copy quote

• We're much better at dealing with dyslexia today than in 50th, but reading difficulties are still a problem in the U.K. I believe there's currently something like eleven thousand functionally illiterate adults in the U.K.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Reading, Believe, Today

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I don't want to be influenced as to what I write in the next book, to hear those voices in my head when I'm writing. The idea of second-guessing your reader is dangerous, trying to please some notional reader looking over your shoulder, instead of just yourself.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Book, Writing, Over You

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There was so much anti-Irish sentiment not just from other kids at the school I went to in Britain, but also the teachers themselves. I remember very clearly a lot of the things people said to me and my sisters. And of course those sentiments go back a long way. When my dad visited London in the 50s and was looking for somewhere to stay, there were signs outside boarding houses that said "No blacks, no Irish."

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Teacher, Dad, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• We always planned to move back to the Republic but it never happened, I'm not sure why. My dad is one of those immigrants who never leaves the place he came from. He talks about Ireland all the time. If any Irishman wins at any sort of sport, he sees it as a personal achievement.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Sports, Dad, Moving

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Reading, Reality, Feelings

  4 Copy quote

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