Top 25 Samantha Shannon Quotes

I’m not going to give it the big ‘I am’ now that I’m a New York Times bestseller.

I was a hacker of sorts. Not a mind ‘reader,’ exactly; more a mind ‘radar,’ in tune with the workings of the aether. I could sense the nuances of dreamscapes and rogue spirits. Things outside myself. Things the average voyant wouldn’t feel.

I was mostly an indoor girl at university. Where other students did drama or music or sport alongside their degrees, I wrote. I used to work on essays and classwork during the day and ‘The Bone Season’ in the evenings.

Rowling is a luminous storyteller. I love her sense of humor and the intricate wizarding world she built around Hogwarts. I think all writers aspire to be like her, to capture readers like she does. But I didn’t think about ‘Harry Potter’ when I wrote ‘The Bone Season.’

I always felt that sci-fi and fantasy were my thing. Bit of a geek, I’m afraid. But I like creating worlds, and I felt it was a genre that gave me more freedom. It just seemed like I belonged there.

I have always been driven; I’ve always wanted to be published, and I wanted to make that happen, so I worked very hard. ‘Perfectionist’ would be a word to describe me.

I had lived in that part of London that used to be called Islington since I was eight. I attended a private school for girls, leaving at sixteen to work. That was in the year 2056. AS 127, if you use the Scion calendar.

It is a strange world, Oxford – quite claustrophobic. I was often glad I was only there for eight weeks at a time.

‘The Bone Season’ is violent. There’s sex. My little brother keeps asking to read it, and he’s 9, so I’m like, ‘No, it’s not happening.’

I was not a rebellious teenager. I was a sit-in-your-room teenager.

Writing a novel is like knocking on a door that will never open. You are so desperate to get in, you will say or do anything. You feel: please take my novel.

I was born in 1991, and ‘Harry Potter’ came out in ’97, so, you know, I was really obsessed. I used to read them in one night.

I know what I want to achieve in each book and the major points, but I don’t plan right down to the chapters. I think that the characters write themselves in some degree.

I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien’s legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.

I’ve never had a supernatural experience. I’ve been tempted to maybe have a tarot-card reading, but I don’t know if I’d necessarily want to know.

I was not really aware of the dystopian genre before I read ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ Many poets as well, like John Donne and Emily Dickinson, would be the influences; I specialized in Emily Dickinson at university. Both of those poets have really interesting ways of looking at life and death.

People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the ‘Oxford bubble’ because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays.

My silver cord – the link between my body and my spirit – was extremely sensitive. It was what allowed me to sense dreamscapes at a distance. It could also snap me back into my skin.

I’m often daydreaming, and it’s because I’ve always liked the idea of there being something more than the normal world.

I worry that people think you have to go to a university to be a good writer, which is categorically untrue. I don’t think I learned how to write at Oxford. I did not go to any creative writing classes or anything.

I was a shy child, and when I was 13, I started wearing braces on my teeth. I used to be acutely self-conscious, and I think writing was a way of withdrawing into my own imagination.

London had so much death in its history, it was hard to find a spot without spirits. They formed a safety net. Still, you had to hope the ones you got were good.

My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ when I left high school, which has always been very special to me – it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I’m also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.

I wanted to write a sci-fi story that would appeal to young women. Loads of girls like sci-fi, but it’s more culturally associated with guys.

I am never not thinking about stories. ‘The Bone Season’ is 90% of my brain – 10% is interacting with the rest of the world.