British - Novelist | May 23, 1953 -
I can remember somebody once saying to me that they thought my life must be less real than these other people that they were writing about, which I found a very peculiar thing 'cos all our lives are equally real, and it's just a matter of depicting them and talking about them.
Ronald Frame
LifePeopleMeWritingSayingI Can
As a little boy, I apparently had a predilection for undoing latch gates, running up pathways and ringing doorbells - and then running off again and away before the door was opened behind me.
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For ten years, I went to piano lessons. I don't think I'm a very musical person, and the theory quite defeated me, but I had a freak aptitude for Debussy and Ravel.
MeThinkTen YearsPersonDefeated
Sundays in my teens were spent on homework: from 8 am until at least 8 pm, with stoppages to be fed and watered. I was carrying up to ten subjects simultaneously.
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When I was younger, when I was at school, I did read a lot of fiction. I think as you get older perhaps you're interested in essays and biographies and things like that. I think it's just important to just read as much as you can.
SchoolThinkYouImportantFiction
'Ghost City' was actually one of the few instances of non-fiction that I had written, and I felt that I probably said what I wanted. I think it must be different for every author; I haven't done very much of it, and perhaps, in a way, I found it rather painful, which is why I don't really do it very often.
CityThinkBe DifferentSaidDone
Some people say that you should read people who think completely differently from you so that everything you read and everything that they say is a challenge to you but there's something to be said for reading people where you think, 'Yes, that's how I would have said it if I could have found the words for it'.
ChallengeWordsPeopleReadingThink
I think, when you are writing non-fiction, you feel there's an obligation to get it absolutely right, so all your factual details have to be, have, you know, to go through a long list of them and tick them. I'm not saying that's not important in fiction, but I think you have a bit more leeway; you can suit yourself.
YourselfWritingSayingThinkYou
The funny thing about writing is, although you are writing about an experience which only you have had, you are trying to welcome other people into it, and there are ways I think of doing this, and one of them is through the senses, through the sounds and the smells.
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A writer's life suits me. It's fairly, well, other people might think it was actually rather dull, but that's fine because I feel that my imagination is enough to kind of keep me happy.
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Originally I wanted somewhere to set my short stories about the sort of people I recognise having grown up with. Carnbeg was staring me in the face all the time, only I had somehow failed to see that. Not seeing the wood for the trees, I suppose.
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What appears on the page comes out of your experience, and no-one is going to see it in quite the same way - so, that being so, you're already doing something in a thoroughly individual and idiosyncratic way anyway.
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