Top 22 Helen Dunmore Quotes

I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

I was always influenced by language.

Writing children’s books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can’t stop themselves – and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

I didn’t choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.

The language has got to be fully alive – I can’t bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don’t see why any reader should put up with it.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book.

I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay.

To try to expunge an individual’s history is a terrible violation.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I’m concerned.

When you are young you don’t always realise how full of doubts everybody is.

I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.

If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates.

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.