Top 45 Sarah Hall Quotes

I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women.

You can’t see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.

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.

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.

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.

Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.

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 don’t think practitioners should necessarily be advertising their work.

I wander around the house and write in bed, at the kitchen table, by the window, in the yard.

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.

For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there’s at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary.

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.

A lot of my literature deals with these people who are somehow magnetic because they have that ability to step over lines.

I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist.

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.

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.

I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life.

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.

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?

Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power.

The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared.

I’ve always been interested in the history of radical feminism – what happened to those women of the 1960s and ’70s.

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.

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.

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.

There’s nothing like the vast, dark Atlantic to remind you of your mortality. But terror can also be exhilarating.

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.

I don’t see that books can be written without political context – not if they’re relevant and ambitious.

My work is of me; it’s not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.

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.

When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop.

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.

I think you can tell any human story in a particular place.

I was a terrible painter – my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso’s demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.

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.

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.

Dystopian novels, such as Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.

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.

I’m a home-roamer and can’t do study or office scenarios.

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.