Rose Tremain CBE FRSL (born 2 August 1943) is an English author, and current Chancellor of the University of East Anglia. Read full biography of Rose Tremain →
Life is not a dress rehearsal.
The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.
When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.
Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my... →
I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges... →
Perhaps, more importantly, I think that most human beings realise only a fraction of the true potential of their minds, so the spiritual or mystical... →
A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.
I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.
I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important.
I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.
Life should be embraced like a lover.
The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.
Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real... →
Rose Tremain CBE FRSL (born 2 August 1943) is an English author, and current Chancellor of the University of East Anglia.