Michelle Paver Quotes

I rode 300 miles through the forest and ate all sorts of strange food. And every time 'Torak' did something new, like swimming with killer whales or kayaking, I thought I'd better go and do it.

I'd been interested in animal behaviour as a teenager and had thought of studying it at one point.

A man crawls into a tomb to die. A boy crawls in to live. You think that's chance?

By about chapter six of 'Wolf Brother,' I was having so much fun that I knew I wanted it to go on and I couldn't tell Torak's story in one book. So I sat down, and it took me about a week to plan in broad outline all six books.

This was the wrong way because - because it wasn't the right way.

For a novelist, the great thing about the Stone Age people is that we know virtually nothing about their beliefs - which means that I get to make it up! But it's still got to be plausible.

Have you ever held a snake? They are so strong. You can see why there are so many myths about them: they are unlike any other creature. It's extraordinary how that little brain can keep everything moving in different directions.

I loved the myths of ancient Greece and Egypt.

But young as I was, I suspected that a God who allows such cruelty wouldn't have cared about bringing it to an end.
― Michelle Paver, Dark Matter

I'm not the next J. K. Rowling. We've got one already. It's flattering to be compared to her. I like her books and loved the first three particularly, but apart from the fact that they've got young boys as heroes, they're very different.

If you're warm enough when you set out, you're wearing too many clothes.

Why do so many children love the idea of being snowed in or shipwrecked, of having to survive on one's own? When I was a child, I was no exception. I wanted to hunt with a bow and arrow like the Stone Age people: to skin deer and build my own shelter. And I desperately wanted a wolf. As we lived in London, my options were limited.

I didn't do it for the money. I know a lot of people say that, but if I'd wanted to be rich, I'd have stayed working as a city lawyer. I gave that up eight years ago and took a massive drop in salary, and I didn't mind because I was doing what I loved. There's plenty of material for the other five books.

I'm quite happy trekking around Greenland on my own, but those big book tours in America or the Far East are the only time I ever really feel lonely.

I actually carry a little picture of a wolf in my wallet, rather like people carry a picture of their kids. The reason I do that is to remind myself why I'm doing this, to remind myself of the story.

How odd, that light should prevent one from seeing.

If you get a sense that your writing isn't quite working, change it. Or cut it out. Don't just tell yourself it'll do, because it won't.

The reeds stood tall and dead: I had the oddest feeling they wanted me gone. The light was failing. I caught a swampy smell of decay. Behind me something rustled and I saw the reeds part for some unseen creature. I thought: No wonder Maud's mad. All her life in a place like this?

A lot of my writing is wish-fulfilment, making things the way I want them to be.

In a ghost story, usually you've got to hang on until daylight, and you'll be alright. But if daylight's four months away, then you have a problem.

Indigenous people all over the world take quite a lot of trouble with their hair and their clothes.

For a child, reading a book can be such an intense experience.

Most of the time he was simply Wolf: clever, inquisitive, and fiercely loyal. Sometimes he was the guide, with mysterious certainty in his amber eyes. Always he was a pack-brother.

Never been so intensely watched by a creature who would kill me if it got the chance. I stared at it, and I felt death staring back. A

I'm constantly being surprised and finding unplanned things - because the writing is a process of experiencing things on the ground with the characters.

I wondered what it must be like to be so handsome. Surely it would affect the behavior of everyone around you, always?

Even if you plan your book, the actual writing is unplanned.

It's true to say that once I've got the bare bones of a story, I often get ideas from my own research trips to faraway places.

My thirties merged into my forties, and I sort of gradually realised that I don't really want children. Now I'm glad I don't have them. Part of that is because I have my books.

I think true wilderness can still be found, but it's hard to reach and dangerous when you get there, which is probably why it still exists.

When my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1991, I asked him if he had any regrets, and he said no. I was a burnt-out litigation solicitor in my thirties, hating my life, and his cancer made me re-evaluate it all.

Mostly, research is much more fun than the actual writing.

Three weeks after New Year, she lost her faith. It happened quite suddenly. She simply woke up and it was gone. As she lay in bed it occurred to her that between religion and superstition there was no difference, since both were based on unreason. To kill a man to redeem the sins of others was as irrational as tapping a hole in one's eggshell to stop a witch using it as a boat.

"So I've got to find a mountiain that nobody's ever seen. And work out the answer to a riddle that nobody's ever solved. And kill a bear that nobody can fight."
Renn sucked in her breath. "You've go to try."

I live on my own, happily, and I've never wanted children, but it did occur to me one day that there's part of me in 'Torak' - he's a loner, I'm a loner - as there's part of me in 'Renn,' who's quite waspish. I think, in some senses, 'Torak' is the son I never had.

Sometimes there's no warning. Nothing at all.

To get the feel of the polar night, I went back to Spitsbergen in winter. I went snowshoeing in the dark and experimented with headlamps and climbed a glacier in driving snow.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

It's the little details I love. How to fletch your arrows with owl feathers, because owls fly silently, so maybe your arrows will, too. How to carry fire in a piece of smouldering fungus wrapped in birchbark. These are the things which help a world come alive.

Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.

Changing from biochemistry to law was easy because I was rubbish in the laboratory. I could never decide how much to put in a test tube because I'm not very good at maths.

I saw myself as a trailblazer in the 1980s as a female lawyer in the City. It was exciting, as women were outnumbered by men five to one. But while I had this sense of trailblazing, in reality, I wasn't pushing boundaries; it was just a personal myth I'd created, as I was doing a job I wasn't enjoying.

Choas errupted amoung the watchers. They didn't think it was over at all. "He cheated! He used fire!"
"No, he won fairly enough!"

Have you forgotten," she said in a furious whisper, "that he nearly killed us? That he threw my quiver in the stream, and threatened to snap my bow?"
It was unclear which she considered worse: threatening them or her bow.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

Toark woke with a jolt from a sleep he'd never meant to have.

What kind of idiot bird sings in the middle of the night?... I wish it'd shut up and let me sleep! - Pirra

The most remote place I've been to was in Greenland. I remember setting out for a solo hike from a small cabin, itself several hours' boat ride from the nearest settlement.

I don't use the Internet, as I don't like living with lots of distractions. I have tried, but I found it a hindrance. as my sense of priorities goes out of the window and it pulls me out of my writing, particularly with email. I'd sit there for hours just replying to emails.

My novel 'Wolf Brother' is set in northern Scandinavia during the late Stone Age, so I was aware from the start of Norse influences. I used some Norse names, and the soul-eater Thiazzi is based on the Norse storm giant, Thiassi.

There's this whole thing of being two people. You are the person you want to be - the writer - and then there's this weird other life of going on tour and talking about the writing. And that really is weird.

I didn't wake up one day and think, 'I'm not going to have children.' My mother was a housewife and brought up three children, so I just thought it would happen.

To track prey, you must first know it as you would a brother.

Moving closer to the edge, I peered down. The water was glassy green, extraordinarily clear. I experienced the feeling I sometimes get when I'm on a bridge or a railway platform. Rationally, you know that you've no intention of stepping off the bridge or the platform - or this ice floe - but you're aware that you could, and that the only thing stopping you is your will.

At university - when I was supposed to be studying biochemistry - I had tried to write a children's book about a boy and a wolf cub, and there was a paragraph in that which was from the wolf's point of view.

Torak and Wolf looked at her in surprise, and she found herself facing two pairs of wolf eyes: one amber, one light-grey.

Vengeance burns,Torak." said Fin-Kedinn as the river bore him away. "It burns your heart. It makes the pain worse. Dont let that happen to you.

There's always a choice,' said Torak, and walked backward off the cliff.

Yesterday, I was in Hatchards, and I saw a photograph of it, the usual view from Darjeeling. Everything flooded back. The cold. The silence. The dread. It was so overwhelming that I staggered outside and vomited in the gutter. People thought I was drunk.

And yet I think I now understand the impulse which drives men to shoot bears. It isn't for the pelt or the meat or the sport - or not only those things. I think they need to do it. They need to kill that great Arctic totem to give them some sense of control over the wilderness - even if that is only an illusion.