Top 14 Sarah Waters Quotes

I’m interested in stories that aren’t getting told: it’s where my interests lie.

Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether it’s terrorism or global financial meltdown or climate change – huge things that affect us deeply, and yet things about which we can do, individually, very little.

I like dramas because there’s a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing.

The early ’20s were like the waist of an hourglass. Lots of things were hurtling toward it and squeezing through it and then hurtling out the other side.

My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.

I’ve never managed to get very far with Henry James.

I was mad about the theatre growing up, really mad. We had a local theatre, the Torch, and I used to usher there. I would see the shows over and over again.

The relationship you have with your mother is like nothing else. They do kind of know everything about you, even though they don’t confront it. That is often a dynamic from childhood onwards. As a teenager, you want to be independent and do slightly furtive things.

I wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.

All I can do is write about whatever grabs me.

When theatre works, it’s like nothing else, and when it doesn’t, which is often, it’s excruciating. It’s perhaps not so excruciating when a novel goes wrong, but there is a kind of magic that can and should happen.

I knew I’d always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, ‘Well, I’d rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one’.

People say, ‘You’re like Dickens’, but I’m not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she’s writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.

I’ve ended up feeling fonder of ‘The Paying Guests’ than of any of my other novels.