Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Set in a nameless colonial country, in an unspecified era, Katie Kitamura's second novel tracks the fortunes of a landowning family during the first waves of civil unrest.
I've always been interested in wolves, since I was a child. There was a wolf enclosure in a wildlife park very close to where I was brought up; they were the main attraction.
For about two years, while researching 'The Wolf Border,' I was a complete wolf bore. I would regurgitate everything I was researching, whether people were interested or not.
Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped.
Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them.
I can gabble on now, but I couldn't when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time in my own head on the moors by myself. It felt like writing was the right way to express myself.
I have ideas. I hear voices. Words accumulate. It's still an overriding impulse. And I'm self-employed, which means I have to be sensible and motivated about paying the bills.
All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It's the law of paternal disenchantments.
I was brought up in the north of England, which is probably no rougher than anywhere else, but I remember as a child being kind of mesmerized by girls fighting on the playground.
Swimming in the U.K. is not really about enjoying a sultry experience. It's about cold, clear acts of purification, and constitutional durability. It's about invigoration and bravado.
You didn’t understand what he was saying, until he kissed you. It was a kiss of such complicity, of such uncomplicated sympathy, that you felt for the first time not alone in your suffering.
Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required.
Wonderful characters rotate around and through bookshops on a daily basis, competing with and possibly even triumphing over fiction when it comes to entertainment, strangeness and inspiration.
It's a lovely feeling, just working away at the desk, putting words down, building words up... I think you have to be aware that what you're doing is not just a private act, it's a societal thing.
Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode.
Apex predators are good for an environment in terms of biodiversity and trophic cascade - we have very few. But realistically, only a few areas could sustain free-roaming wolves in Britain, mostly in Scotland.
I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.
Show, don't tell, is a mantra repeated by tutors of creative writing courses the world over. As advice for amateurs, it is sound and helps avoid character profiling, unactivated scenes, and broken narrative frames.
Art history became an A-level option at my school the year I started sixth form. This happened because another student and I cajoled and bullied the head of the art department into arranging it with the examination board.
It's been noted that writing about the production of art is a masquerade or metaphor for writing about writing. This may be true, there are similarities - both the verbal and the visual represent the thing or the concept.
For its speculations to be taken seriously, dystopian fiction must be part of a discussion of contemporary society, a projection of ongoing political failures perhaps, or the wringing of present jeopardy for future disaster.
When you are a kid, a wolf is an amazing sight, so sumptuous. I sort of knew these were splendid creatures, that I was not going to find them outside roaming around. It was like a dog, but not a dog. It was incredible, a god!
It's very interesting to me that the nationalist movement in Scotland has become so positive and self-reflective rather than anti-English. The referendum in 2014 was peaceful, for all its deeply and passionately divided people.
Over the years, I've lived in a variety of places, including America, but I was born and raised in the Lake District, in Cumbria. Growing up in that rural, sodden, mountainous county has shaped my brain, perhaps even my temperament.
My writing is called exotic or avant-garde because I write about rural places. Has it really come to this, that if you write about the country you are avant-garde? How did this happen? Modern agriculture and spaces are still so relevant.
My favourite pool is located in a remote valley in the eastern Lake District, surrounded by vine-hung cliffs and slippery boulders. It has a torrential sheet waterfall at one end and is almost black in colour, so it appears bottomless, a portal to nowhere.
You think back and you ask yourself why you became so interested in wolves. I think it was because when I was very small, growing up in a little hamlet near Shap, we would go to Lowther Wildlife Park for birthday parties. Now closed, it was only three miles from my parents' house.
We should not forget that when we limp away afflicted through the spirit, it is not to the factory gates or to the corporate steps we pilgrimage. Instead we go to the sea for its salt. We find shade under the sycamores on the great avenues. Or we go to the rivers where water tells us modestly of its own sickness.
There are stories told to him only at this time of year. Fantastic, magical stories, the old Hollier in the woods finding only three red berries, which peel back in the night to reveal gifts of frankincense, gold and myrrh, Christmas in hot deserts, dust-blown countries, the necklace of tears, and the story of the robin.
At night, in the garden, it occurs to you that it might have been your heart that left you as you reached the capital. Your heart might not have travelled well, closed up in its cavity, quivering and gnawing at the bars of your ribcage during the commute. It might be tracking north now, along edgelands, past spoil-heaps and stands of pylons, under motorway passes, back to the higher ground. Back to him.