Top 30 Alan Garner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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

— Alan Garner

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

— Alan Garner

4. “I wish Monkeys could Skype. Maybe one day.”

— Alan Garner

5. “When a monkey nibbles on a weenis, it’s funny in any language.”

— Alan Garner

6. “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.”

— Alan Garner

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

— Alan Garner

8. “It’s where I keep all my things. Get a lot of compliments on this. Plus it’s not a purse, it’s called a satchel. Indiana Jones wears one.”

— Alan Garner

9. “Im not supposed to be within two hundred feet of a school or a Chuck E. Cheese.”

— Alan Garner

10. “Hitting the gym to release stress is not nearly as effective as hitting the people that cause the stress to begin with.”

— Alan Garner

11. “Because of my nature, I find ‘spiritual’ and ‘creative’ to be synonymous. I am not exclusively a Christian; but for me work is prayer. So in pleading for the nurture of creativity, in life and in education, I plead for the nuture of the spiritual. I cannot separate the two.”

— Alan Garner

12. “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.”

— Alan Garner

13. “I’ll buy metaphor, but simile’s a cop-out used by scaredycats who won’t commit to anything. Simile’s for cowards.”

— Alan Garner

14. “Roland searched for a place that would be safe to climb, and found a staircase on the exposed inner wall of a house. The top step was the highest part of the house: everything above it, including the bedroom floor, had been knocked down. Roland tested his weight, but the wood was firm, so he went up.”

— Alan Garner

15. “The wood lay still. The air throbbed with insects, and flies hovered and disappeared and hovered. Meadowsweet grew in a mist of flowers, and the sun glinted on the threads of caterpillars which hung from the trees as thick as rain. “By,” said Gwyn, “there’s axiomatic.”

— Alan Garner

16. “You and I and everyone else are a bit like turtles: we only make progress when we stick our necks out a little.”

— Alan Garner

17. “That man’s gaga,” said Roger when they were out of hearing. “He’s so far gone he’s coming back.”

— Alan Garner

18. “At dawn one still October day in the long ago of the world, across the hill of Alderley, a farmer from Mobberley was riding to Macclesfield fair.”

— Alan Garner

19. “From my differing awareness, I sense something you may not yet. Especially among artists... resistance is growing. Conciousness is on the move. Something is at work in the world: a general recognition of the crisis of the spirit, of the banal and shoddy, in human affairs. It is universal and it must be met. Recently, an Australian Aboriginal shaman warned me: ‘The Great Serpent has woken. Jarapiri stirs. The earth shakes. And the warriors are gathering.”

— Alan Garner

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

— Alan Garner

21. “Ive learned never to try and force words to come.”

— Alan Garner

22. “The prince went straight to the king of dragons, who took him on his back to the distant mountain, and with his fire he split the crystal, and the red fox that had shimmered like a ruby in its clear heart ran out. But the king of eagles pounced on it from the sky, and ripped the fur a darker red. Up sprang the raven, and fled on the wind, but the king of falcons closed with it, and the talons met in the raven’s heart.”

— Alan Garner

23. “The more I learn, the more I am convinced that there are no original stories. On several occasions I have “invented” an incident, and then come across it in an obscure fragment of Hebridean lore, orally collected, and privately printed, a hundred years ago.”

— Alan Garner

24. “Oh, drop dead, you miserable cow.”

— Alan Garner

25. “I wanted us to have a holiday, not a ruddy breakdown.”

— Alan Garner

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

— Alan Garner

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

— Alan Garner

28. “The deed is nothing. It is the thought that breeds fear; and we achieve little by lingering.”

— Alan Garner

29. “The walls were shedding their texture and taking another in the pouncing feathers. Gwyn.”

— Alan Garner

30. “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

31. “He cut the veil of the rock; the hooves clattered the bellowing waters below him in the dark. The lamp brought the moon from the blade, and the blade the bull from the rock. The ice rang.”

— Alan Garner

32. “Is there light in Gorias?”

— Alan Garner

33. “For at the very moment you have Now, it flees. It is gone. It is, on the instant, Then. Surely.”

— Alan Garner

34. “What the eye doesn’t see,”’ said the man, ‘“the heart doesn’t grieve for.” Or does it?”

— Alan Garner