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

- Rose Tremain

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

- Rose Tremain

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 …

- Rose Tremain

Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow …

- Rose Tremain

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

- Rose Tremain

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 no…

- Rose Tremain

When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along wit…

- Rose Tremain

The imagination conjures gifts; what the ungrateful, unsentimental part of the mind has to do is to unwrap them, find fault with them, see them for w…

- Rose Tremain

There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existence is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, which is fre…

- Rose Tremain