Tobias Hill Quotes

My strong suits, coming from poetry, will naturally be description, which I love doing. It comes very easily, and possibly structure, up to a point.

In the way such things happen in real life, I suspect I'll never see him again. We talked about that once. There was a term in Japanese, he said. Eng. It was both a concept and a word of advice. It meant that anyone you meet may be the most important person in your life. Therefore, that every stranger should be treated as a friend. Loved before it is too late. You never know (he said) in which night your ship is passing.

'War and Peas' by Michael Foreman, one of the great British children's illustrators. His watercolours are so lovely you could almost eat them, just as members of the target audience have been trying to do for decades.

As a child, l was fascinated by gemstones in the way that small children are fascinated by dinosaurs or trains. Stones seem very physical and look like sweets. You can look at them microscopically and imagine things about them.

At school, I was never given a sense that poetry was something flowery or light. It's a complex and controlled way of using language. Rhythms and the music of it are very important. But the difficulty is that poetry makes some kind of claim of honesty.

The problem with themes is that writers don't realise they are themes until someone points them out.

Judgments and secrets are what make a good novel.

People have expectations of what you are as a writer. And writers, on the whole, don't like to be classified.

If, at a party, I say I'm a poet, people have a hard time responding, almost as if I'd said I'm a priest.

I hate clever-cleverness, but I love good honest cleverness.