Susan Hill Quotes

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If you were writing a short ghost story, I would say start very quietly and go, 'One, two, three jump.' Or start with a jump and make it jumpier. But with a long story, it must have rises and falls.
Susan Hill Quotes: If you were writing a
I collect Victorian automata and coming across them in the dark does give you a little shudder.
Susan Hill Quotes: I collect Victorian automata and
It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.
Susan Hill Quotes: It's easy to write a
I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.
Susan Hill Quotes: I go downstairs and the
I had always known in my heart that the experience would never leave me, that it was now woven into my very fibers, an inextricable part of my past, but I had hoped never to have to recollect it, consciously, and in full, ever again. Like an old wound, it gave off a faint twinge now and again, but less and less often, less and less painfully, as the years went on and my happiness, sanity and equilibrium were assured. Of late, it had been like the outermost ripple on a pool, merely the faint memory of a memory.
Susan Hill Quotes: I had always known in
For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.
Susan Hill Quotes: For I see that then
I was an only child who was never really good at anything else. I had no other option. I could write; I wanted to write; I wrote. Otherwise, I was unemployable.
Susan Hill Quotes: I was an only child
But, in Moon Cottage, they are still asleep. I let myself in quietly and make a pot of tea, and take it outside, to sit under the apple tree and feel pleased. In the Buttercup field, one of the newest calves born a couple of nights ago, feeds and nuzzles and then wanders a yard or two away from its mother. It is white as milk, huge-eyed. The wrens are flying in and out of the woodshed and the bluetits in and out of a hole in the wall, by some guttering. Over the fields and farms and rooftops of Barley, the sun climbs and climbs. The dew has almost dried. The best of the day is done.
Susan Hill Quotes: But, in Moon Cottage, they
They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.
Susan Hill Quotes: They told of dripping stone
Ghost stories ... tell us about things that lie hidden within all of us, and which lurk outside all around us.
Susan Hill Quotes: Ghost stories ... tell us
Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not 'real'. No. But what was 'real'? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.
Susan Hill Quotes: Whatever was about, whoever I
Films always make everyone else rich save the author.
Susan Hill Quotes: Films always make everyone else
Gardeners celebrate the influence of time. If we have had a late cold spring followed by a desiccating drought, autumn may be the most soft and golden for years; one poor season will sooner or later be compensated for by another.
Susan Hill Quotes: Gardeners celebrate the influence of
I would act, pretend, and the pretense would become real.
Susan Hill Quotes: I would act, pretend, and
I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure.
Susan Hill Quotes: I love the book. I
...I was forced to live through it all, every minute and then every day thereafter...
Susan Hill Quotes: ...I was forced to live
We make our own destiny.
Susan Hill Quotes: We make our own destiny.
By the next war, the message will have got through.
There will never be another war.
There will always be wars.
Men couldn't be so stupid, John! After all this? Isn't the only real purpose of our being here to teach them that lesson - how bloody useless and pointless the whole thing is?
Men are naturally stupid and they do not learn from experience.
Susan Hill Quotes: By the next war, the
There are some temptations that cannot be resisted, some lessons we never learn.
Susan Hill Quotes: There are some temptations that
A man may be accused of cowardice for fleeing away from all manner of physical dangers but when things supernatural, insubstantial and inexplicable threaten not only his safety and well-being but his sanity, his innermost soul, then retreat is not a sign of weakness but the most prudent course.
Susan Hill Quotes: A man may be accused
I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.
Susan Hill Quotes: I've never written poetry. I'm
It would be difficult to write a convincing ghost story set on a sunny day in a big city.
Susan Hill Quotes: It would be difficult to
Though they don't always have to be set in fog, weather is incredibly important in ghost stories. As is suspense: you've got to turn the screw very, very slowly.
Susan Hill Quotes: Though they don't always have
Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.
Susan Hill Quotes: Some people make tunes, but
We are not punished for our sins, we are punished by them. We can't live with guilt for the whole of our lives..
Susan Hill Quotes: We are not punished for
You try so hard to shield me, and protect me, and really, there is no need, you try so hard to hide what you want, how you feel, and of course you can't.
Susan Hill Quotes: You try so hard to
Here, in the garden at night, it is another world, strange and yet friendly and familiar, never frightening. There is such quietness, such sweetness, such refreshment.

Close your eyes. Breathe in again, smell everything mingled together, flowers and earth and leaves and grass. Smell the night.

Listen. Nothing at all. Silence, rushing like the sea in your ears.

However small and sparse the garden, and wherever it is, even inside a great city, if something grows there, it is a magic place by night.

Leave it, walk quietly back towards the lights that shine out of the house. You will take its magic with you.

Now, you will sleep.
Susan Hill Quotes: Here, in the garden at
There were some things I could never begin to know about.
Susan Hill Quotes: There were some things I
I walked up the stairs and hesitated at the open door.
Susan Hill Quotes: I walked up the stairs
In early October, the woods begin to come alive again, and that surprises many people, who think of them in autumn as places of decay and dying, falling leaves and animals hiding away for their long winter hibernation. But it is summer there that is the dead time, in summer the air hangs heavy and close and still, nothing flowers, nothing sings, nothing stirs, and no light penetrates. But, now, there is a stirring, a sense of excitement.
Susan Hill Quotes: In early October, the woods
I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.
Susan Hill Quotes: I have sat here at
The lamps were lit, and a good fire crackled in the great stone fireplace. There was a discreet chink of china, the brightness of silver teapot and muffin cover, the comforting smell mingled of steaming hot water, toast and a little sweet tobacco.
Susan Hill Quotes: The lamps were lit, and
It was true that the ghastly sounds I had heard through the fog had greatly upset me but far worse was what emanated from and surrounded these things and arose to unsteady me, an atmosphere, a force - I do not exactly know what to call it - of evil and uncleanness, of terror and suffering, of malevolence and bitter anger
Susan Hill Quotes: It was true that the
It's fine. I hardly think about it now. It's long gone. Yet there is sometimes the shadow of a shadow, and when that happens I wonder if it could come back. And I don't know, because I don't know what caused it in the first place. My ohysche was turned inside out and shaken, but they never got to the bottom of why.
Susan Hill Quotes: It's fine. I hardly think
Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it.
Susan Hill Quotes: Fast reading of a great
Deep under the earth, inside its cardboard coffin, shrouded in the layers of white paper, the china doll with the jagged open crevasse in its skull was crying.
Susan Hill Quotes: Deep under the earth, inside
It's just occurred to me that some horror films everybody laughs because they're so ridiculous and they're so frightening in a way, the filmmakers' are trying everything, that they just end up being funny.
Susan Hill Quotes: It's just occurred to me
I'm really quite hard to scare so it was about mining times when I have jumped, and what creeps me out.
Susan Hill Quotes: I'm really quite hard to
I felt inquisitive, keyed up with interest and excitement that foreign surroundings always induced in me, and in a sense I felt at home, too, for there is something familiar about a port to any seasoned traveller - the sights, smells, activities even the sprawl of streets and wharves that surround and owe their existence and livelihoods to it.
Susan Hill Quotes: I felt inquisitive, keyed up
It is okay to climb as long as you are not afraid, because being afraid is what made you fall
Susan Hill Quotes: It is okay to climb
In another life I would be a medievalist. I loved Chaucer, far more than Shakespeare.
Susan Hill Quotes: In another life I would
The one thing the Victorians really believed in was philanthropy. I think we've forgotten the obligation to be philanthropic. I think we need smaller government, but I want to make it clear I'm not the Sarah Palin of the Cotswolds.
Susan Hill Quotes: The one thing the Victorians
Small children will talk to anyone, once the guard of shyness has fallen, and they have, like the elderly, a sense of immediacy, a need to say or do something, now, now, the minute it is thought of, combined with that other sense, of the complete irrelevance of time.
Susan Hill Quotes: Small children will talk to
Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.
Susan Hill Quotes: Every reader re-creates a novel
I had changed, and gone on changing, but I did not fully remember how it had begun, or understand why.
Susan Hill Quotes: I had changed, and gone
Yorkshire is so much part of me.
Susan Hill Quotes: Yorkshire is so much part
Kindness is a sort of love without being love.
Susan Hill Quotes: Kindness is a sort of
I don't really do jolly. I don't know why, I just don't.
Susan Hill Quotes: I don't really do jolly.
I felt dead and sick inside.
Susan Hill Quotes: I felt dead and sick
I have always believed that places with long history, especially those in which terrible events have taken place, retain something of those times, some trace in the air, just as I have been in many a cathedral all over the world and sensed the impress of centuries of prayers and devotions. Places are often filled with their own pasts and exude a sense of then, an atmosphere of great good or great evil, which can be picked up by anyone sensitive to their surroundings.
Susan Hill Quotes: I have always believed that
...the past still held secrets, the past threw its shadows...
Susan Hill Quotes: ...the past still held secrets,
Once you finish a book, you let it go out into the world to seek its fortune.
Susan Hill Quotes: Once you finish a book,
This gardener will be out in the very early morning and from late afternoon, attentive to small changes in the quality of light and the atmosphere, as well as to every nuance of the season, which combine to create perfection.
Susan Hill Quotes: This gardener will be out
I'm not one of those people who hates Amazon because they're big. Why pay a third more for the same thing?
Susan Hill Quotes: I'm not one of those
I have only read very classic traditional English ghost stories, other than Henry James, who wrote some magnificent short ones as well as the longer 'Turn of the Screw.' He, Dickens, and M.R. James are my influences.
Susan Hill Quotes: I have only read very
I read a lot of ghost stories because I was writing a ghost story. I didn't think at all I was writing a horror or a thriller or whatever because it is about a ghost, whereas a horror film can be about aliens or things that rise out of the marsh that have no human shape.
Susan Hill Quotes: I read a lot of
I don't understand it when people get cross about how one of their works was adapted and say, 'Oh, they ruined it!' Well, the book is still there.
Susan Hill Quotes: I don't understand it when
A lot of writers want everything put on screen, but it doesn't work like that. The screenwriter brings her own imaginative interpretation, just as the director and actors do.
Susan Hill Quotes: A lot of writers want
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