Latest Maggie O'Farrell Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I try not to be too precious about my writing, and I try to be willing to walk away from it for a few hours when something's not working, to let things percolate a bit. I try not to hide myself away from life too much, because I think that's a risky thing for a writer to do.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Writing, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende says there's no such thing as writer's block, you just need to live a bit more. I try to bear that in mind.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Block, Mind, Trying

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• I have no control, of course, over how I'm marketed. It's a sad thing, though, that so many people perceive literature to be gendered. The idea that some subjects are male and some are female is just preposterous to me. It's reductive and nonsensical, to separate writers and subjects and plots along gender lines. It's meaningless.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  People, Female, Literature

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

• You need a lot of energy to get a novel finished. You need an ability to ignore everyone around you. It's why I don't read my reviews any more. I know a lot of people say that, but I really don't read them.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  People, Energy, Ability

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

• 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

• In the first night of the Arvon Foundation course, Elspeth Barker said something about the newspaper along the lines of - and I'm paraphrasing - "I do these pieces for them and it's amazing, because I don't type it out, I just fax it as it is, and the literary editor has a machine that can transform my handwriting into typed text." At which point I put my hand up and said, "Actually, I'm that machine."

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Night

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think it's dangerous to have lots of time on your hands as a writer. Time to pursue every little alleyway, to follow every single whim. I feel I've done my best writing when I'm stretched for time, when you're most pressured.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Writing, Thinking, Done

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The key thing in my becoming a writer was going on a Arvon Foundation residential writing course. I took with me a really messy twenty thousand words of something that later became After You'd Gone, my first novel. My tutors were Barbara Trapido and Elspeth Barker.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Writing, Messy, Novel

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I still have a stammer. I hate it; I loathe and despise it. But it's always there, and I have lots of ways to conceal it. I can conceal it now but I'm not good on the telephone. I get my husband to make dentist appointments. And I hate live radio. Hate it. I really try to avoid it at all costs. But it's always there. Stammerers become skilled at sentence construction and synonyms: we have to be. Faced with a problem word, we need to have instant access to eight others we could use instead - ones we could say without stumbling. I think my stammer is a huge part of my being a writer.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Husband, Hate, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

• Something that had an enormous influence over my relationship with language was my stammer. I had a really bad stammer in my childhood and adolescence, and that imbues you with two things. First, a hyper-sensitivity to grammar, because a stammerer will have problematic sounds, impossible verbal stumbling blocks. Second, writing is just such a joy when you have a problem with speaking. It's so astonishing to watch language coming out of your pen without any hesitation or dysfluency.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Block, Writing, Childhood

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• While I was writing the book, one of my children was diagnosed with dyslexia. Dyslexia is a very tiny word for a wide-ranging neurological condition that affects different people in different ways. But I was reading an awful lot about it, to try and find ways of helping my child. I think a lot of fiction comes from this desire to confront unanswerable questions, and it's heartbreaking to see your child, a bright child, struggling so much with something that others are finding so easy. It's such an assault to the child's self-esteem and, as a mother, it's hard to watch.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Mother, Children, Struggle

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• All the time I was plowing through books on dyslexia, I found myself asking: what if, what if? What if you were a kid the 1950s with this condition, when there were no books on it, when there was no understanding of it. I remember kids in my class at school who just didn't seem to progress in their reading. There was no extra help. People just thought, "Oh, he or she isn't so bright, or they're obstinate."

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Book, Reading, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

• 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

• I was interested in the ripples of feminism passing through Britain and Ireland in the mid-Seventies - how the reverberations of the feminist political movement were being felt in suburban households. So many novels end with a marriage.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Feminist, Political, Feminism

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

• I met a retired police detective. And he said to me that the interesting thing about heatwaves, from a police perspective, is that the number of people who just walk out of their lives when the weather gets unbearable is astronomic. He said the police prepare themselves for it - for a huge rise in the instances of missing persons. People choose to disappear when it's hot. It was fascinating.

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Interesting, Perspective, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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