Sarah Hall Quotes

Freedom comes with responsibility; it comes with privilege and a conscience. It comes with difficult choices. We cannot stand by and allow the Authority to do what it is doing any more. We cannot wait for them to come and take apart what we've made. I will not allow it. You know me. I will not allow it.

Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy.

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.

Personal effects: how irrelevant they are, how sad, how lost, how vagrant, without the force that gives them purpose.

Quite a lot is required of writers these days in terms of, if not promoting the work, then being a representative of the work. It's a difficult thing, really.

Lipstick never lasted long when they were together; he would always kiss her after she had applied it, as if he liked the smearing viscous sensation. Sometimes she felt sure it was discomposing her that he enjoyed.

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.

That boy may have been born on third base but he sure as shit ain't scored a triple.

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

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.

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

I felt impelled to write. It felt demonic, and I wanted to improve, the way some people habitually pick up a guitar and get better at playing it and making up songs.

She did not make monsters of us. She simply gave us the power to remake ourselves into those inviolable creatures the God of Equality had intended us to be. We knew she was deconstructing the old disabled versions of our sex, and that her ruthlessness was adopted because those constructs were built to endure. She broke down the walls that had kept us contained. There was a fresh red field on the other side, and in its rich soil were growing all the flowers of war that history never let us gather. It was beautiful to walk in. As beautiful as the fells that autumn.

Those partial to drink were hiding faults and dishonesty. They were sloppy souls, even the ones with pleasant manners and fine noses.

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.

This is your first and final chance, your one and only biography.

I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.

There were times when initial introductions were so vested with something other as to confuse and distract and entrance both parties, Cy would realize later. And only further into their relationships when you knew the person better, and their place in your life became clear, if there was love, if there was hate, if there was deepness of any kind, only then did you understand that the embers of meaning have been present all along and glowing since that first moment you laid eyes on them. As if you already knew them before you came to know them. As if some rift had bent time.

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.

When you are a kid, a wolf is an amazing sight, so sumptuous. I sort of knew these were splendid creatures, that I was not going to find them outside roaming around. It was like a dog, but not a dog. It was incredible, a god!

Let him join the men of the past. Her old lovers were ghosts. None of them had survived; none were missed.

I don't think practitioners should necessarily be advertising their work.

One thing I will say, they often take it better than a man. Pain, that is. Probably the residue of tolerance from when they were all bloody witches and got stoned or burned or drowned for it, eh lad? Never tell your mother I said that, by the way.

There are men who make the world seem populated by good men, those who are intuitive, or have been taught.

The truth of death is a peculiar thing. For when they leave us the beloved are as if they never were. They vanish from this earth and vanish from the air. What remains are moors and mountains, the solid world upon which we find ourselves, and in which we reign. We are the wolves. We are the lions. After so many nights treading the banks with the dogs and my brothers, intent on some mettlesome purpose I did not truly understand, night after night I dreamed of the river. I dream it now: a river of stolen perfumes, winding its way through our inverse Eden.

Elliot Rawley was a drinker, Cy's mother had been right. And he was a poor drinker. One that let the demons of the bottle into his head when he tipped it back, demons that went about unloosing all the trouble they could find stashed in the catacombs of his mind. Every tragic thing that had ever happened, every self-doubt, every delusion, freed itself from bondage and revisited him when he drank.

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

I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum.

You've been wondering lately when the moment is that somebody is truly lost to you.

At night, in the garden, it occurs to you that it might have been your heart that left you as you reached the capital. Your heart might not have travelled well, closed up in its cavity, quivering and gnawing at the bars of your ribcage during the commute. It might be tracking north now, along edgelands, past spoil-heaps and stands of pylons, under motorway passes, back to the higher ground. Back to him.

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

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.

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

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.

I'm very aware of modern countryside issues, such as rewilding: how, as science progresses, we begin to understand that a healthy ecosystem is multiform.

Like a dog defeated in a frenzied circle by its own tail and slowing and realizing then that the tail it was after all along was already its possession

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

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'll tell you this, lad: A tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who's got it on his back.

Show, don't tell, is a mantra repeated by tutors of creative writing courses the world over. As advice for amateurs, it is sound and helps avoid character profiling, unactivated scenes, and broken narrative frames.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Apex predators are good for an environment in terms of biodiversity and trophic cascade - we have very few. But realistically, only a few areas could sustain free-roaming wolves in Britain, mostly in Scotland.

People were made up of shit and piss and phlegm and bits and pieces of experience.

I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power.

I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off.

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.

Prescient experts of biological codes.

Our lives are politically wound.

I don't reckon there are many writers who start out really expecting writing to be an attainable occupation. Well, I didn't. It was a pipe dream.

The man had added to his body in a way that was brave and timeless and beyond adornment.

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.

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.

I lost the ability to fear and panic. Instead I felt practical and causal. I had never known time to pass so acutely before. I sat out through the night with the patrol, watching the bitter glow of stars overhead, listening as the season exhaled and the layers of vegetation shrugged and compressed, like the ashes of burnt wood. On the hills I was aware of every corporeal moment, every cycle of light. I felt every fibre of myself conveying energy, and I understood that it was finite, that the chances I had in life would not come again.

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

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.

Life is not straightforward: relationships bifurcate; there is nothing more complicated, more confounding, than love.

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

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

Set in a nameless colonial country, in an unspecified era, Katie Kitamura's second novel tracks the fortunes of a landowning family during the first waves of civil unrest.

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

To be comfortable inside one's sadness is not valueless. This too will pass. All things tend towards transience, mutability. It is in such mindful moments, when everything is both held and released, that revelation comes.

Red, brown, yellow, green, black. Five colours to say everything that could be said. And what Cy suddenly wanted, more than anything in the world just then, what he wanted was that missing blue, primary and resistant to the trade. Blue that was unstable and misbehaved when left in skin. Blue like the sea that had taken his father. Blue, for his mother's sake, and for the true colour of every bereaved and bloodless heart when it is collapsing.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The world can accommodate your situation, as it accommodates all situations. And your body will keep explaining to you how it all works, this original experiment, this lifelong gift. Your body will keep describing how, for the first time being at least, there is no escape from this particular vessel. These are your atoms. This is your consciousness. These are your experiences
your successes and mistakes. This is your first and final chance, your one and only biography. This is the existential container, the bowl of your life's soup, wherein something can be made sense of, wherein there is a cure, wherein you are.

It doesn't do to rely on those in charge completely. That's one thing the Yanks always got right. You've done a bit of history in school, haven't you? Well, now. Imagine if the National Guard had surrendered their arms, and the Germans had invaded after all. We'd have been fighting with broom handles and axes like hairy medievals while they ran over us with tanks. Your

It's been noted that writing about the production of art is a masquerade or metaphor for writing about writing. This may be true, there are similarities - both the verbal and the visual represent the thing or the concept.

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 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.

You've found that there is something that can make you feel, and make you feel present: sex. Not the routine, dusk-and-dawn sex of a trusted, established relationship, but illicit, dangerous sex. Sex that is novel and leaves you sore; that is experienced in the gaps between your mundane, moral life; that is strange and breathless and addictive.

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.

Over the coun-ter, she might let you mount-her, but in the morning, there'll be no more whoring, as its off to the doc-ter for warts of your cock-ter

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?

You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.

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

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