Top 16 Quotes by Rose Tremain

When you've finished a piece of work you've had a kind of love affair with it.

I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important.

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.

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 surroundings.

I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

So history is fertile territory for me and I think I could feel happy with any period of history, provided I had the right sources and the necessary time for the initial research.

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 novels, male as well as female.