Top Maggie O'Farrell Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Maggie O'Farrell Biography

Maggie O'Farrell

Maggie O'Farrell (born 1972) is a Northern Irish novelist. Her book The Hand That First Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She appeared in Waterstones' 25 Authors for the Future.

Read about Maggie O'Farrell in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Maggie O'Farrell Quotes

Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?

Designed, Happens, Life, Terrible, Terrible Things, Things

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.

Born, Four, Moved, Real, Sunday, Winter

The key thing in my becoming a writer was going on a Arvon Foundation residential writing course. I took with me a really messy twenty thousand words of something that later became After You'd Gone, my first novel. My tutors were Barbara Trapido and Elspeth Barker.

Barbara, Messy, Novel, Trapido, Writer, Writing

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. "

Dad, Houses, London, School, Stay, Teacher

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.

Control, Female, Idea, Literature, Meaningless, People

The role you've been ascribed in childhood can twist or break apart or seem outgrown, especially when you have your own family and begin to see your own childhood from a different angle. You remember. You reassess. I think that was the kernel of the novel for me. This idea that you change but that your family, the people you were born into, might find that change hard to accept. You no longer fit the mold you've always been ascribed. When the adult children in the book converge back on their small family home there's a sense that they don't fit there anymore.

Angle, Begin, Book, Children, Home

In the first night of the Arvon Foundation course, Elspeth Barker said something about the newspaper along the lines of - and I'm paraphrasing - "I do these pieces for them and it's amazing, because I don't type it out, I just fax it as it is, and the literary editor has a machine that can transform my handwriting into typed text. " At which point I put my hand up and said, "Actually, I'm that machine. "

Arvon, Handwriting, Lines, Newspaper, Night, Pieces

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.

Children, Taken, Son, Child, Leave, Love

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.

Book, Husband, Irreplaceable, Pattern, Reading, Working

I think it was Rose Macaulay who said, "A house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived. "

Distressing, House, Macaulay, Rose, Thinking, Unkept

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

Realized, Straight, Terrible, Thing, Thinking, Want Something

For a while I used to listen to those whispers about babies costing you books, and Cyril Connolly's loathsome quote that "There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall. " But it's rubbish. Absolute rubbish. A huge amount of your work is done when you're not at your desk. Knotty problems that you need your unconscious to solve. So it can be helpful to walk away and focus on other things and it can be helpful to be a bit harassed in your daily life, to be hungry for time to write.

Art, Baby, Book, Done, Good, Rubbish

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.

Book, Read, Reading, Write, Writing

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. "

Book, Remark, Thinking, Together, Writing

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.

Brain, Bring, Effect, Personality, Secret, Strange

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.

Day, Feelings, Life, Reading, Reality, Touch

Something that had an enormous influence over my relationship with language was my stammer. I had a really bad stammer in my childhood and adolescence, and that imbues you with two things. First, a hyper-sensitivity to grammar, because a stammerer will have problematic sounds, impossible verbal stumbling blocks. Second, writing is just such a joy when you have a problem with speaking. It's so astonishing to watch language coming out of your pen without any hesitation or dysfluency.

Astonishing, Block, Childhood, Enormous, Stammer, Writing

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.

Britain, Feminism, Feminist, Interested, Marriage, Political

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.

Country, Felt, Left, Probably, Trying, Writing

Motherhood is all-encompassing, and in a way, as the mother, you're the star of the household.

Household, Mother, Motherhood, Way

1