Daily Inspiration Quote by Rose Tremain

Intensity is Tremain's admission of appetite: she isn't chasing subjects so much as the bodily sensation of being seized by them. The phrasing matters. "I think I'm drawn" softens the claim, as if the pull is partly unconscious, partly instinctive - not a mission statement but a self-diagnosis. It also protects her from the pieties of literary branding; she doesn't say she writes "important" books, only that she gravitates toward material that arrives with that charge.

The pairing of "intense" and "important" reveals a novelist's private balancing act. Intensity is the engine: desire, grief, obsession, moral panic - the stuff that makes scenes ignite. Importance is the alibi, the implied permission slip that lets a writer spend years inside a made-up world without feeling frivolous. Put together, they hint at a third term she doesn't name: consequence. Tremain's best historical fiction works because it treats the past not as costume drama but as pressure cooker, where individual lives are warped by hunger, class, faith, sex, and power.

Contextually, this is a late-career writer talking in a culture that alternates between demanding relevance and dismissing earnestness. Tremain stakes out a middle lane: she isn't pledging to topicality or to pure aesthetic play. She's describing a compass. The subtext is slightly defiant: fiction still earns its keep when it goes where things feel risky, when it refuses the anesthetic of "nice" subjects. Intensity is her standard for aliveness; importance is her standard for attention. Together they explain why her work keeps returning to moments when people are forced to change, or break.