The complexion of a novelist is seldom rosy (Paul Bailey once announced to a heavy-hearted audience of novelists at PEN that we have always been an ugly tribe). We are engaged in indoor activity, haemorrhoidal, prone to chillblains, poor of circulation.

Jane Gardam

Categorized in : Novelists Tribes Ugly

I just knew I would be a writer. It just seemed the only sensible thing to do.

Jane Gardam

things-to-do would-be sensible

Somewhere inside we do know everything about ourselves. There is no real forgetting. Perhaps we know somewhere, too, about all there is to come.

Jane Gardam

future real forget

I think the most dangerous influence for a young writer is to be treated with cynicism or discouragement.

Jane Gardam

young-writers influence thinking

I gave myself to my children. It happens to some women.

Jane Gardam

my-children happens children

If you've not been loved as a child, you don't know how to love a child.

Jane Gardam

how-to-love know-how children

Jane Austen we know never let two men converse alone in any novel because what they said would be unknown to her.

Jane Gardam

men two book

English country life is more like Chekhov than The Archers or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.

Jane Gardam

archer ethics country

Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blow lamp on a building site full of dry tinder.

Jane Gardam

short you spiritual time

I discovered that writing was very nice indeed when I was very young, and I never changed. I don't think my style has changed very much at all - though I hope what I say is a bit more interesting. It's about getting to know a character and loving them, I think.

Jane Gardam

think style hope character

If I've got one thing that I really believe about fiction and life, it's that there are no minor characters.

Jane Gardam

about one-thing life believe

Mum was a tremendous Anglo-Catholic. Very impressive, actually. She made me go to church for years - I still don't want to because of that.

Jane Gardam

go me church want

For years, there was no man in the house when my husband was off on law cases in the Far East. Without writing, I would have been bored and unfaithful, maybe both, and the children would have been hideously over-protected.

Jane Gardam

man husband law children

Only a great genius like the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell can be mother, wife and novelist without solitude. I couldn't write until my youngest child went to school, and then I began - the first morning - and I've never stopped.

Jane Gardam

great wife mother morning

I hate the idea of sequels. I think you should be able to do it in one book.

Jane Gardam

think you hate book

When I was young and the empire was beginning to disintegrate, the idea was absolutely unbelievable, particularly to children who'd been taught that the sun never set... that's what all my books are about, the end of empire.

Jane Gardam

end beginning sun children

I can't write the same book over and over again... let it go, once it's gone!

Jane Gardam

over go gone book

I started to write as a child as soon as I could read, or even before, when my mother read me Beatrix Potter at bedtime. Writing seemed to me to be the only sensible way to live and be happy.

Jane Gardam

be-happy me mother happy

In modern novels, there is no one I want to copy. My style 'is a poor thing, but it is my own.'

Jane Gardam

copy my-own style poor

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

Jane Gardam

i-am anything new writing

I longed from a tiny child to get away on my own. When I was five, I walked out along the sands from Redcar, nearly all the way to Hartlepool.

Jane Gardam

own child my-own way