All Helen Dunmore Quotes
Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.
Helen Dunmore

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

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

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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.
Helen Dunmore

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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.
Helen Dunmore

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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.
Helen Dunmore

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To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation.
Helen Dunmore

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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.
Helen Dunmore

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

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A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.
Helen Dunmore

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The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.
Helen Dunmore

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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.
Helen Dunmore

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

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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.
Helen Dunmore

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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.
Helen Dunmore

51% of people like this quote
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