Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Our lives are politically wound.
Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy.
I'm a home-roamer and can't do study or office scenarios.
Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power.
You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.
I don't think practitioners should necessarily be advertising their work.
I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women.
My work is of me; it's not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am.
Of all the conditions we experience, solitude is perhaps the most misunderstood.
Swimming in the cold and the dark of British autumn is not for the faint-hearted.
You’ve been wondering lately when the moment is that somebody is truly lost to you.
James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.
I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life.
The man had added to his body in a way that was brave and timeless and beyond adornment.
When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop.
I wander around the house and write in bed, at the kitchen table, by the window, in the yard.
I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off.
Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers.
I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious.
The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.
I am a feminist, although I always worry saying that because you then get people asking you about the 1970s.
I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum.
There's nothing like the vast, dark Atlantic to remind you of your mortality. But terror can also be exhilarating.
I've always been interested in the history of radical feminism - what happened to those women of the 1960s and '70s.
For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary.
I'll tell you this, lad: A tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who's got it on his back.
Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.
A lot of my literature deals with these people who are somehow magnetic because they have that ability to step over lines.
Those partial to drink were hiding faults and dishonesty. They were sloppy souls, even the ones with pleasant manners and fine noses.
You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn't able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work.
You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.
I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.
People went through life like well handled jugs, collecting chips and scrapes and stains from wear and tear, from holding and pouring life.
I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power.
I married an American. He was from the Pacific Northwest but went to law school in the South, so I was living in Virginia and North Carolina.
Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.
I don't reckon there are many writers who start out really expecting writing to be an attainable occupation. Well, I didn't. It was a pipe dream.
One of the things I try to do with my writing is try to evoke the spirit of the place. I think these things imprint on the landscape and the culture.
The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared.
It's taken me 15 years to feel I might be able to write and publish short stories, and for the assiduous checks of the industry to allow some through.
I'm very aware of modern countryside issues, such as rewilding: how, as science progresses, we begin to understand that a healthy ecosystem is multiform.
Writing, and its theatre of operation, is better than working shifts packing frozen sausages; that's all I need to think about if I'm having difficulties.
We all have our preferences - some people go for birds - but for me, there's just something about the wolf; the design of it is really aesthetically pleasing.
Quite a lot is required of writers these days in terms of, if not promoting the work, then being a representative of the work. It's a difficult thing, really.
Nightmares of a capital city overwhelmed by tsunami, war or plague transfix us, but catastrophe is first felt locally, and there are many homes outside the city.
I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.
There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy.
I felt impelled to write. It felt demonic, and I wanted to improve, the way some people habitually pick up a guitar and get better at playing it and making up songs.
I was the feral, mud-bathing, tree-climbing variety of child. Why would I want to read about pirates when I could build a raft and terrorise sheep along the riverbanks?
In my early 20s, connecting with fiction was a difficult process. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to what was meaningful, what convinced, and what made sense.