Quotes from Alan Garner

It's not a job but a condition. (Alan Garner on writing)

Why are you here?" "To fetch the woman I cut from the veil of the rock." "Why did you cut?" "To send her spirit out, so that she would come to make the child, for me to teach to dance and sing and dream, to free the beasts within the rock to fill the world." "Have you found her?" "She is not here. There are only people horrible to see." "Where are your stories?" said the other. "I cannot tell them. My head is a cloud.

Roland searched for a place that would be safe to climb, and found a staircase on the exposed inner wall of a house. The top step was the highest part of the house: everything above it, including the bedroom floor, had been knocked down. Roland tested his weight, but the wood was firm, so he went up.

The prince went straight to the king of dragons, who took him on his back to the distant mountain, and with his fire he split the crystal, and the red fox that had shimmered like a ruby in its clear heart ran out. But the king of eagles pounced on it from the sky, and ripped the fur a darker red. Up sprang the raven, and fled on the wind, but the king of falcons closed with it, and the talons met in the raven's heart.

The more I learn, the more I am convinced that there are no original stories. On several occasions I have "invented" an incident, and then come across it in an obscure fragment of Hebridean lore, orally collected, and privately printed, a hundred years ago.

Oh, drop dead, you miserable cow.

The wood lay still. The air throbbed with insects, and flies hovered and disappeared and hovered. Meadowsweet grew in a mist of flowers, and the sun glinted on the threads of caterpillars which hung from the trees as thick as rain. "By," said Gwyn, "there's axiomatic.

I do not think consciously of children [when writing] … I do know that children read me more intelligently than adults do.

There...is your spiritual obligation to literature: root out the reductive; seek excellence; pursue the numinous. And, along with a disciplined intellect (for one is of no use without the other) give to children their imaginations, of which they are being robbed with totalitarian intensity by the trash around them.

For at the very moment you have Now, it flees. It is gone. It is, on the instant, Then. Surely.

You and I and everyone else are a bit like turtles: we only make progress when we stick our necks out a little.

At dawn one still October day in the long ago of the world, across the hill of Alderley, a farmer from Mobberley was riding to Macclesfield fair.

What the eye doesn't see,"' said the man, '"the heart doesn't grieve for." Or does it?

to show that he kept watch and worked that the world would not be lost. And, as he sat, hope came.

Is there light in Gorias?

My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.

She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.

My mother read nursery rhymes to me, and my grandmother told me folk stories, but as a child I had no interest in writing whatsoever.

I learnt that I must never finish a book with nothing else to do.

I don't think I've ever frightened myself before when writing, but there were areas where there was terror, as though I was looking into somewhere that I didn't know existed before, and it frightened me.

As far as the world was concerned, from 1979 to 1996, I didn't publish any original material; it just wasn't there.

My primary tongue, I would call North-West Mercian.

My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.

I love research so much that I do an enormous amount; it helps put off the moment of starting to write the story.