Daily Inspiration Quote by 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 novels, male as well as female"

Rose Tremain, Novelist

About this Quote

Every novelist knows the quiet scandal Rose Tremain admits here: fiction is supposed to be invention, yet it’s also an elaborate form of self-disclosure. “Perhaps” does a lot of work. It’s modest on the surface, but it’s also a sideways claim of fellowship and authority - an experienced writer naming a trade secret while making it sound like common sense.

The phrase “walk such a line” frames authorship as balance, even risk: between confession and craft, authenticity and impersonation, the private self and the public page. Tremain then smuggles in a crucial comparison - “as we all do in our dreams” - that normalizes the practice. Dreams are where identity gets porous and ethics loosen; we become people we’d never be in daylight. By invoking dreams, she recasts character-making less as deception and more as a natural mental function, a nightly rehearsal for empathy and projection.

“I put something of myself into all the characters” is both an admission and a defense against simplistic readings. It rejects the cheap biographical hunt (“Which character is really you?”) and replaces it with a distributed model of selfhood: the author as a set of impulses, fears, hungers, and contradictions that can be placed anywhere. The final insistence - “male as well as female” - is a pointed rebuttal to gender-policed imagination. Tremain stakes out the writer’s right to cross borders, arguing that interior truth isn’t owned by a body type; it’s accessed through attention, and paid for with vulnerability.

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About the Author

Rose Tremain (born August 2, 1943) is a Novelist from England.

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