Maggie O'Farrell Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“I think it was Rose Macaulay who said, "A house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived."”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in cushioning your insecurities with a system of belief that tells you 'Don't worry. This may be your life but you're not in control. There is something or someone looking out for you -- it's already organised.' It's all chance and choice, which is far more frightening.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“You learn so much with each book, but it's what you teach yourself by writing your own books and by reading good books written by other people - that's the key. You don't want to worry too much about other people's responses to your work, not during the writing and not after. You just need to read and write, and keep going.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
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“Always, at the end of every book, there are things you will be unsatisfied with, and still more things that later on you will realize were not right. But mistakes are part of what a book is. That itchy, dissatisfied feeling at the end of a novel is useful. It's what keeps you writing and gets you writing the next one. It's what keeps you learning.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“Gretta sits herself down at the table. Robert has arranged everything she needs: a plate, a knife, a bowl with a spoon, a pat of butter, a jar of jam. It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“What are you supposed to do with all the love you have for somebody if that person is no longer there? What happens to all that leftover love? Do you suppress it? Do you ignore it? Are you supposed to give it to someone else?”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“We're much better at dealing with dyslexia today than in 50th, but reading difficulties are still a problem in the U.K. I believe there's currently something like eleven thousand functionally illiterate adults in the U.K.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
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“As other authors have realized, heat can have a strange effect on us, can cause odd chemical reactions in the brain. Heat can bring out secrets; it can change people's personalities.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“Motherhood is all-encompassing, and in a way, as the mother, you're the star of the household.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“I always had the urge to write. Not in the sense of wanting to be a writer, but just writing things down, getting words on a page. Graphomania, it's called. I've always had a definite love of stationary products - I used to spend all my pocket-money on pens and notepads. I still do, in a way.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
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“Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“I don't want to be influenced as to what I write in the next book, to hear those voices in my head when I'm writing. The idea of second-guessing your reader is dangerous, trying to please some notional reader looking over your shoulder, instead of just yourself.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“There was so much anti-Irish sentiment not just from other kids at the school I went to in Britain, but also the teachers themselves. I remember very clearly a lot of the things people said to me and my sisters. And of course those sentiments go back a long way. When my dad visited London in the 50s and was looking for somewhere to stay, there were signs outside boarding houses that said "No blacks, no Irish."”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
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“We always planned to move back to the Republic but it never happened, I'm not sure why. My dad is one of those immigrants who never leaves the place he came from. He talks about Ireland all the time. If any Irishman wins at any sort of sport, he sees it as a personal achievement.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“My husband, William Sutcliffe, the writer, is my first reader and in many ways my most important. That initial reading of the manuscript is crucial and irreplaceable and you want them to approach it as someone in a bookshop might, not knowing much about it. So I've got into this pattern of not telling Will anything about the book I'm working on. He often knows nothing about the book I'm working on at all until I give him the whole manuscript and ask him to read it. The book I'm working on at the moment he knows nothing about. No one does.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“She wanted to say, no. She wanted to say, I have a son, there is a child, this cannot happen. Because you know that no one will ever love them like you do. You know that no one will look after them like you do. You know that it's an impossibility, it's unthinkable that you could be taken away, that you will have to leave them behind.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
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“I have no control, of course, over how I'm marketed. It's a sad thing, though, that so many people perceive literature to be gendered. The idea that some subjects are male and some are female is just preposterous to me. It's reductive and nonsensical, to separate writers and subjects and plots along gender lines. It's meaningless.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“I was interested in the ripples of feminism passing through Britain and Ireland in the mid-Seventies - how the reverberations of the feminist political movement were being felt in suburban households. So many novels end with a marriage.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“As you'll know yourself, there are these moments when you're writing a book when one remark or moment will pull everything together and you'll think, "That's it. I've got what I need."”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“I met a retired police detective. And he said to me that the interesting thing about heatwaves, from a police perspective, is that the number of people who just walk out of their lives when the weather gets unbearable is astronomic. He said the police prepare themselves for it - for a huge rise in the instances of missing persons. People choose to disappear when it's hot. It was fascinating.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
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“People had tell me the most personal things. People I'd never met before would say thing like "Oh, that was the summer I had an affair with my neighbor." The 1976 heatwave occupies a peculiar place in people's psyches.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“When I worked at The Independent newspaper, I had colleagues who would laugh and say that whenever they picked up the phone to my dad and heard his accent, they thought they were about to hear a five-minute warning to get out the building. People in Britain have always thought it acceptable to make racist remarks about the Irish. The prejudice underlying that supposed joke was everywhere.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“When my family moved from Ireland in the 70s, Britain was such a difficult place to be Irish. It was a decade of real social and economic upheaval in Britain. There were strikes, the three-day week, the oil crises, huge inflation, the winter of discontent and, what was it, four Prime Ministers? And relations between Britain and Ireland at that time were at an all-time low. I was born in the year of Bloody Sunday and of course the pub bombings happened in the mid-1970s.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“Despite being from Ireland, I've always avoided writing about it, for two reasons. For a very small country, Ireland has produced an astonishing number of literary geniuses, and at some level I probably never felt, having left as a toddler, that I had the right to try and add my voice. That's part of it. But I also didn't want to write something that was the equivalent of the Irish theme pub. You find them all over the world. The idea of producing a novel that might replicate that type of ersatz really set my teeth on edge.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
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“I have two sisters, and I think siblings are always going to be irresistible for novelists. They have been throughout time and they'll continue to be.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell -
“We all have a family, whether we like it or not; we all come from somewhere, and there's something strange in the way you have, with siblings, two or three personalities yoked together for life. You grow up thinking those family relationships are set in stone and then you get older and realize they're not. They're always shifting.”
-- Maggie O'Farrell
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