Words matter. These are the best Susanna Clarke Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I always start out saying exactly what everybody looks like. I don’t know why.
In ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,’ I wanted to create the most convincing story of magic and magicians that I could.
I must confess that in my teens and twenties, I loved ‘Mansfield Park’ rather in spite of Fanny than because of her. Like Fanny’s rich, sophisticated cousins, I didn’t really get her.
I can write most places. I particularly like writing on trains. Being between places is quite liberating, and looking out of the window, watching a procession of landscapes and random-ish objects, is very good for stories.
It’s not easy to convey to someone who doesn’t read comics just how Alan Moore has dominated the field since ‘Watchmen.’
It seemed to me that you make magic real by making it a little prosaic, a little difficult and disappointing – never quite as glamorous as the other characters imagine.
I could always imagine more interesting places to be than where I was. And more interesting people than me being there. Eventually, this led to making up stories and writing things down.
In some ways, ‘Mansfield Park’ is ‘Pride and Prejudice’ turned inside out.
Nothing, I find, has prepared me for the sight of my own characters walking about. A playwright or screenwriter must expect it; a novelist doesn’t and naturally concludes that she has gone mad.
I always really liked magicians. I’m not even sure why – except that they know things other people don’t, and they live in untidy rooms full of strange objects.
You can get this feeling of the English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh fairy, but it is by nature very elusive. It would be possible to pin down a German fairy, but the English one just vanishes, becomes the shadow under the trees.
The phone conversations about a possible TV series of ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’ stretch back years, but now that the moment has come, now that I am actually here at Wentworth Woodhouse, I lose my bearings.
One way of grounding the magic is by putting in lots of stuff about street lamps, carriages, and how difficult it is to get good servants.
