Helen Dunmore Quotations

Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country.

I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me.

As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates.

Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.

I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.

I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

When you are young you don't always realise how full of doubts everybody is.

I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation.

Children will not pretend to be enjoying books, and they will not read books because they have been told that these books are good. They are looking for delight.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

Many chapters are headed by poem quotations. These epigraphs are another way of shining light on what is happening at this stage of the novel.

You have to search for the voice of each character: the things that he or she could or could not have said, the distinctive rhythm of the voice.

I'm a poet and I've read a lot of Russian poetry and can hear It's sounds. Russian poetry is so important to an understanding of the culture.

Once one habit peels away the others follow it. You have to hold on, or the next thing you'll find yourself parading down the street in your nightdress. Habit is everything.

For you where never my blood sister so no more shall I call you little sister

I was always influenced by language.

We are creatures of story.

In a world without air all you breathe is adventure!

i wish i was away in Ingo far across the briny sea sailing over deepest waters where neither care nore worry trouble me

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

If the garden of Eden really exists it does so moment by moment, fragmented and tough, cropping up like a fan of buddleia high up in the gutter of a deserted warehouse, or in a heap of frozen cabbages becoming luminous in the reflected light of roadside snow.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.

A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away.