Top 27 Quotes by Helen Dunmore

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.

Children will not pretend to be enjoying books, and they will not read books because they have been told that these books are good. They are looking for delight.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

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.