Top 35 Rose Tremain Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Life is not a dress rehearsal.”

— Rose Tremain

2. “Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.”

— Rose Tremain

3. “The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I’ve written, regardless of time and place.”

— Rose Tremain

4. “At the age of five, Gustav Perle was certain of only one thing: he loved his mother.”

— Rose Tremain

5. “In the planning stage of a book, don’t plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.”

— Rose Tremain

6. “When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats’s idea of Negative Capability and Kipling’s advice to “drift, wait, and obey.” Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.”

— Rose Tremain

7. “Human society is ninety percent muck that won’t disperse to the appropriate location that’s why I chose the profession of plumber.”

— Rose Tremain

8. “Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general – as we all do in our dreams – I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.”

— Rose Tremain

9. “Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.”

— Rose Tremain

10. “And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to make her irreplaceable.”

— Rose Tremain

11. “There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existence is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, which is free.”

— Rose Tremain

12. “Music is so important in a human life. It finds a space inside us that nothing else touches.’ Gustav.”

— Rose Tremain

13. “Let winter come. Let the snow fall and consume Bath in a shroud of silence. Let everything feel as bound and stifled as my heart.”

— Rose Tremain

14. “The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for what they are and then alter them.”

— Rose Tremain

15. “The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you’re not in that existential panic when you don’t have a novel at all.”

— Rose Tremain

16. “Respect the way characters may change once they’ve got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.”

— Rose Tremain

17. “And he feels grateful that he has been left with this one substantial relic of all his years of service and thinks how sincerely he has deserved this. Yet he knows the world in which people deserve things or do not deserve them is passing away. Europe is at war. Fairness is now becoming a word without meaning.”

— Rose Tremain

18. “This is the state to which I shall aspire, where what is important to me is already mine.”

— Rose Tremain

19. “Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you’re certain it’s as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.”

— Rose Tremain

20. “And it is silence that she hears, the silence of lost years that have no voice left in them.”

— Rose Tremain

21. “He fell over frequently, but he never cried, though the ice was hard, the hardest surface his bones had ever met. He taught himself to laugh instead. Laughing was a bit like crying. It was a strange convulsion; it just came from a different bit of your mind. The trick was to move the crying out of that bit and let the laughter in. And so he’d pick himself up and carry on, laughing.”

— Rose Tremain

22. “When you’ve finished a piece of work you’ve had a kind of love affair with it.”

— Rose Tremain

23. “I did have a beautiful life. It ended early, that’s all.”

— Rose Tremain

24. “Life should be embraced like a lover.”

— Rose Tremain

25. “Wasting time changes the nature of time. And the heart is stilled.”

— Rose Tremain

26. “How could such a picture be in a national newspaper The model had ridiculous breasts the size of pumpkins and lips fat and wet and all that she was wearing was a spangled G-string.”

— Rose Tremain

27. “Forget the boring old dictum, ‘Write about what you know.’ Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that’s going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.”

— Rose Tremain

28. “And I was entirely held by my own words, as if my words had become a liquid and I immersed in them, like a drowning man in a rushing river.”

— Rose Tremain

29. “So history is fertile territory for me and I think I could feel happy with any period of history, provided I had the right sources and the necessary time for the initial research.”

— Rose Tremain

30. “Things are only white for a bit.’ Emilie.”

— Rose Tremain

31. “We have to become the people we always should have been.”

— Rose Tremain

32. “Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.”

— Rose Tremain

33. “I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.”

— Rose Tremain

34. “Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted ‘first readers.’”

— Rose Tremain

35. “At the moment, I’m toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea – which needs empty space in my head – is barely formed yet.”

— Rose Tremain

36. “A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.”

— Rose Tremain

37. “But such are our days. Such are the days and times of Every Man and, no matter how hard we work and strive, we can never know when something shall be given to us and when it will be taken away.”

— Rose Tremain

38. “We cannot shape the world according to the delights society decrees appropriate for us; we must be unconventional in our joys and find them wherever we can.”

— Rose Tremain