Geraldine Brooks Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• Write what you know. Every guide for the aspiring author advises this. Because I live in a long-settled rural place, I know certain things. I know the feel of a newborn lamb's damp, tight-curled fleece and the sharp sound a well-bucket chain makes as it scrapes on stone. But more than these material things, I know the feelings that flourish in small communities. And I know other kinds of emotional truths that I believe apply across the centuries.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Believe, Writing, Emotional

• It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Country, Writing, Past

• You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Writing, Past, Empathy

• Writing is like bricklaying; you put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have to push it down and start again, but you don't stop; it's your trade.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Wall, Writing, Down And

• I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Writing, Pages, Sometimes

• I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The 'mot juste' unarriving? Tell that to your desk.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Writing, Years, Middle East

  "A Home in Fiction". Boyer Lectures 2011: "The Idea of Home", Lecture 4, www.abc.net.au. December 11, 2011.

• Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Writing, Light, Years

• When I write a word in English, a simple one, such as, say, 'chief,' I have unwittingly ushered a querulous horde into the room. The Roman legionary is there, shaking his 'cap,' or head, and Al Cap is there, slouching in his signature working man's headgear.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Writing, Simple, Men

  "A Home in Fiction". Boyer Lectures 2011: "The Idea of Home", Lecture 4, www.abc.net.au. December 11, 2011.

• When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Writing, Thinking, Fiction

• While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.

  Geraldine Brooks

  Writing, Reality, Thinking

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