With 'Broken Harbour,' a third of the way through, I worked it out and had to go back and bloody rewrite. Tana French More Quotes by Tana French More Quotes From Tana French The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you cracking to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other's hands. Tana French girldreamsong Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition. Tana French oxygenrealself I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges. Tana French ozoneorangecutting I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better - Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos - so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms. Tana French bookyearsthinking Real isn't what they try to tell you. Time isn't. Grown-ups hammer down all these markers, bells, schedules, coffee-breaks, to stake down time so you'll start believing it's something small and mean, something that scrapes flake after flake off of everything you love till there's nothing left; to stake you down so you don't lift off and fly away, somersaulting through whirlpools of months, skimming through eddies of glittering seconds, pouring handfuls of hours over your upturned face. Tana French coffeerealbelieve Here's a little tip for you. If you don't like being called a murderer, don't kill people. Tana French murdererlittlespeople That kind of friendship doesn't just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness. Tana French morningbeautifulmoving I'd always been fascinated by archaeology; it was my original career plan as a kid. Tana French plancareerkidalways Most animals are pragmatic about mysteries: If they run across something they don't understand, all they care about is whether it's edible and whether it's dangerous. Humans, on the other hand, are drawn to the mystery for its own sake. Tana French understanddangerousmysterycare In TV writing, Armando Iannucci's satire 'The Thick of It' is brilliant - equal parts hysterically funny, terrifyingly believable, and Oh-my-God-I-can't-believe-he-actually-said-that - and it's got the most satisfyingly creative insults ever. Tana French insultscreativewritingfunny Donna Tartt blows me away - that impeccable writing, so rich you could eat it and so luminous that it lights up the whole room, and the way she brings her characters to life so completely and in such fine detail that you know them as intimately as your dearest friends. Tana French meyoufriendslife My night stand is permanently jammed with books I want to read. Tana French booksstandwantnight I'm a big admirer of Daniel Woodrell for his beautiful, precise, sparse prose - I don't do succinct well, so I'm in awe of writers who do. Tana French wellbigwhobeautiful I'm slightly in awe of writers, such as Sophie Hannah, who follow outlines. Tana French writersfollowwhoawe I've been fascinated by mysteries for as long as I can remember. Real, fictional, solved, unsolved, I don't care; they all fascinate me. I think that's a core human trait. Tana French mecarerememberlong I'm always looking for the potential mystery in everything; I can't imagine writing about anything else. Tana French lookingalwaysmysterywriting It's OK to screw up. For me, this was the big revelation when I was writing my first book, 'In the Woods': I could get it wrong as many times as I needed to. Tana French mewoodswritingbook Your character is always right. No real person thinks they're being stupid or misguided or bigoted or evil or just plain wrong - so your characters can't, either. Tana French personstupidevilcharacter Don't be scared of 'said.' Writers sometimes go looking for alternatives because they worry that 'he said' and 'she said' will feel repetitive if they're used all the time, but I swear, they won't. Tana French lookingfeeltimesometimes
