Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

~ Janet Frame

Janet Frame Imagination Inspirational Novel Writing

All writers--all beings--are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..

~ Janet Frame

Janet Frame Exile Writing

...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

~ Janet Frame

Janet Frame Writing

...we could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words'...

~ Janet Frame

Janet Frame Reading World Building Writing

I had a cousin once who lived in your dictionary, inside the binding, and there was a tiny hole which he used for a door, and it led out between trichotomy and trick. Now what do you think of that? It was only a few minutes walk to trigger, then over the page to trinity, trinket and trional, and there my cousin used to fall asleep.

~ Janet Frame

Janet Frame Books Cousin Cousins Dictionaries Dictionary Lexicon Words

I know there is a moment when sound slips down the torn lining of itself into silence, is carried unheard and secret in its own pocket. But the crimson birds could find no such escape, no means of slipping beyond themselves between the cracks of color and song to a white undiscovered silence.

~ Janet Frame

Janet Frame Birds Silence Sound

People dread silence because it is transparent; like clear water, which reveals every obstacle—the used, the dead, the drowned, silence reveals the cast-off words and thoughts dropped in to obscure its clear stream. And when people stare too close to silence they sometimes face their own reflections, their magnified shadows in the depths, and that frightens them. I know; I know.

~ Janet Frame

Janet Frame Dread Fear Quiet Silence

I don't want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses.

~ Janet Frame

Janet Frame Identity Self Knowledge

And at times I murmured the token phrase to the doctor, ‘When can I go home?’ knowing that home was the place where I least desired to be. There they would watch me for signs of abnormality, like ferrets around a rabbit burrow waiting for the rabbit to appear.

~ Janet Frame

Janet Frame Mental Illness Psychiatric Hospital

I will put warm woolen socks on the feet of the people in the other world; but I dream and cannot wake, and I am cast over the cliff and hang there by two fingers that are danced and trampled on by the giant unreality.

~ Janet Frame

Janet Frame Madness Worlding

They all seemed hungry, happy, and healthy enough in their buzzing—oh the days were hot, and the noise of bees filled the air that was dusty with pollen and sun haze, and there were tiny black flies stuck to one another crowded by the creek and a creek stink rising from the deep pool under the willow tree where a wheat sack of new kittens had been drowned, and their tiny terrible struggling had shot like an electric current through the confusion of muddy water and up the arm of the person who had tied the stone around the mouth of the sack and thrust it into the water; and the culprit had not been able to brush away the current; it penetrated her body and made her heart beat with fear and pity. I was the culprit.

~ Janet Frame

Janet Frame Bees Cat Cats Creek Drowning Flies Kitten Kittens Willow Willow Tree