Maggie O'Farrell Quotes

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.

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

I still have a stammer. I hate it; I loathe and despise it. But it's always there, and I have lots of ways to conceal it. I can conceal it now but I'm not good on the telephone. I get my husband to make dentist appointments. And I hate live radio. Hate it. I really try to avoid it at all costs. But it's always there. Stammerers become skilled at sentence construction and synonyms: we have to be. Faced with a problem word, we need to have instant access to eight others we could use instead - ones we could say without stumbling. I think my stammer is a huge part of my being a writer.

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.

You need a lot of energy to get a novel finished. You need an ability to ignore everyone around you. It's why I don't read my reviews any more. I know a lot of people say that, but I really don't read them.

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.

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.

I think it's dangerous to have lots of time on your hands as a writer. Time to pursue every little alleyway, to follow every single whim. I feel I've done my best writing when I'm stretched for time, when you're most pressured.

All the time I was plowing through books on dyslexia, I found myself asking: what if, what if? What if you were a kid the 1950s with this condition, when there were no books on it, when there was no understanding of it. I remember kids in my class at school who just didn't seem to progress in their reading. There was no extra help. People just thought, "Oh, he or she isn't so bright, or they're obstinate."

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.

Spending a lot of time away from home was strange. My parents visited me, obviously, but I was in hospital a lot, alone. And then when my health had improved a bit and I was in a sick-bed in the house, with the life of the house going on around me, that was very vivid for me. I always think that's a bit like the position of a novelist in a novel, going through drafts: there but not there, one remove from reality.

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.

I think all families have these secrets, and it's sometimes the strangest things that bring them out. That was part of my interest in the heatwave, in heat as a catalyst for uncovering truths. I was reading Alice in Wonderland to one of my kids recently, and I remembered that it starts on a really hot day. Alice falls asleep because of the heat; the whole story is predicated on falling into a heat-fueled dream.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While I was writing the book, one of my children was diagnosed with dyslexia. Dyslexia is a very tiny word for a wide-ranging neurological condition that affects different people in different ways. But I was reading an awful lot about it, to try and find ways of helping my child. I think a lot of fiction comes from this desire to confront unanswerable questions, and it's heartbreaking to see your child, a bright child, struggling so much with something that others are finding so easy. It's such an assault to the child's self-esteem and, as a mother, it's hard to watch.

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.

I try not to be too precious about my writing, and I try to be willing to walk away from it for a few hours when something's not working, to let things percolate a bit. I try not to hide myself away from life too much, because I think that's a risky thing for a writer to do.

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.

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.

The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende says there's no such thing as writer's block, you just need to live a bit more. I try to bear that in mind.

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.

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

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

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.

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.

Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

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.

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?

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

In the course of writing a book I'll produce loads of pieces of paper to help the novel itself. Diagrams, charts, family trees. And at the end of each book I'll pack it all away. It takes me a while to do it - it's like a relationship that way; there's a period of letting - go, of grief, in a way - but then I box it up, label it, and put it in the attic.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."