Nicola Griffith Quotes

The fact they could check becomes the prophecy they must believe.

Writing a balanced, beautiful novel, where plot and character and
setting and pacing and narrative structure and imagery and, above all,
story work in harmony and true proportion, is fucking *hard*."
--Nicola Griffith,
www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030929...

Lore, if you wait for the right moment, you'll wait forever.

My first website went up in 1995. On it I ran a feature called Ask Nicola. Readers would email me questions, I'd answer whichever took my fancy.

She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father's words, and her mother's, and her sister's. Utterly unlike Onnen's otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn't there.

Setting is my primary joy as a writer, building a world and watching people respond to it.

Her cheeks were hectic, brown eyes brilliant, and not only from the cold. Women have lit up that way for thousands of years when they have found someone they want, someone whose belly will lie on theirs heavy and soft and urgent, whose weight they welcome, whose voice thrills them, whose taste, scent, turn of the head makes them thrum with need, ring and sing with it. They laugh. They glow.

I'm not sure many writers are trying to reconcile all the things that are separated in our culture - body and mind, urban and pastoral, lyricism and hardboiled, men and women, joy and grief. I tried to do quite a lot, but I wanted to create a serious work of literature.

There are no commandments against love," he said.

Hild fetched a lump of grey salt for Mildburh and mortar and pestle to crush it in. She loved the gritty crunch and thump under her hand. It sounded like a cat eating a bird.

Reading is the gateway to so many things that helps makes it possible for seven billion people to live together on one planet. Literature is the great extra-somatic keeper of our knowledge of what it is to be human. Reading elevates us. We read to be our best selves.

Everyone has this notion of the Middle Ages - certainly the early Middle Ages - as being this very superstitious era. I think that all eras are superstitious. We all have our magical thinking.

I hit someone."

"Yes." I stopped four feet away.

She shook her hand at her side, lifted it, looked at it. "I hit him. He came down the stairs and I hit him. I really hit him. I've spent years wondering if I could, wondering what I'd do if it happened to me, if I'd been the one in front of that theatre...." She looked at her hand again, fascinated. "I hit him, and he ran away."

The realization of what she had done, the exhilaration of her own strength rushed into her, like champagne rushing to fill lead crystal. She shimmered with it, she fizzed. I wanted to lift her in both hands, drink her down, drain her, feel the foam inside me, curling around heart, lungs, stomach.

I stepped closer. She lifted her chin. Closer still.

"Wolf eyes," she whispered, and I could feel her breath on my throat, "so pale and hungry.

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Wood is an endlessly adaptive material. You can plane, chisel, saw, carve, sand, and bend it, and when the pieces are the shape you want you can use dovetail joints, tenpenny nails, pegs or glue; you can use lamination or inlay or marquetry; and then you can beautify it with French polish or plain linseed oil or subtle stains. And when you go to dinner at a friend's house, the candlelight will pick out the contours of grain and line, and when you take your seat you will be reminded that what you are sitting on grew from the dirt, stretched towards the sun, weathered rain and wind, and sheltered animals; it was not extruded by faceless machines lined on a cold cement floor and fed from metal vats. Wood reminds us where we come from.

I sipped the coffee. It was delicious, perfectly prepared, as I imagine anything prepared by Annie Miclasz would be. One of those formidable women who felt they had to hide their efficiency behind a soft, caring front; who hid for so long that the front became real; one of the women who kept the world turning; one of the women it paid to never, ever cross.

There is one thing Margaret Thatcher said that I agree with: if you have to tell people you're important, you're not.

Always know what they want to hear - not just what everyone knew they wanted to hear but what they didn't even dare name to themselves. Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted all along.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

She liked time at the edges of things
the edge of the crowd, the edge of the pool, the edge of the wood
where all must pass but none quite belonged.

There are days when I should be writing, and I am so tired that I can't. And the fatigue also affects my emotions, making me not even care about writing. There are days when I wake up so angry I can barely speak, and also days when I am so sad.

I want to write about grown-up things.

You're like a sharp bright piece broken from a star. Too sharp, too bright, sometimes, for your own good.

Dogs own space and cats own time.

If you have the language gift, you can use it as a tool.