Quotes from Jane Gardam

Kai tik atsiranda mergin?, egzamin? pažymiai ima blog?ti. Kuo karštesn? aistra, tuo pras?iau sekasi mokslas.

Apie praeit?, nebent ji b?t? be galo laiminga, vaikai kalb?ti nelink?.

But it's true, she thought, nobody really knows a thing about another's past. Why should we? Different worlds we all inhabit from the womb.

each side of the saddle, all in wickerwork but

I was seeing something I didn't understand and did not want to. No I wasn't. I was seeing something I had always understood and wanted to understand better.

Christianity is supposed to be all about love but it's utterly useless when you're in love.

The idea that mothers and daughters can say everything to each other is a myth.

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

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.

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

The best novel I wrote was one called 'Crusoe's Daughter,' which never won any prizes. But I was getting somewhere in that. I'm not sure I have in any of the others.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I knew I had a lot to say. Not politically - politics have always confused me - but perhaps spiritually.

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.

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.

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

She saw her mother's face, imprisoned in the emptiness of Empire and diplomacy.

She wishes there were only dead authors. Living ones are beneath her attention.

It's—I'm sorry, Eliza—it's the way you make a fool of yourself now. He says that you have crumbled. Nobody now would dream you had been to a university. Your prudence did not develop. Say what you like about equality of mind, prudence is usually a male attribute, especially in the Civil Service where of course there are still very few women, as we know. Making judgments is a female failing, justified by the dangerous word 'instinct.

Herman glowered, saying that clearly only Americans were historians now. 'They have so little of it to learn,' said Dulcie.