Nicola Griffith Quotes

#1. 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.

Nicola Griffith

#2. I'm tired of being considered a lesbian writer, tired of being a science-fiction writer, tired of being a thriller writer. I'm a writer. Period. Story matters to me.

Nicola Griffith

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

Nicola Griffith

#4. They were connected: the world, her body, her face. Perhaps she should not be asking who she was but, rather, of what she was a part.

Nicola Griffith

#5. 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.

Nicola Griffith

#6. I don't belong to anyone! I'm not a thing, to be kept or ordered or driven to such despair that I open my own veins. Look at me, Aoife. Look at me! I'm a woman.

Nicola Griffith

#7. Dogs own space and cats own time.

Nicola Griffith

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

Nicola Griffith

#9. I want to write about grown-up things.

Nicola Griffith

#10. 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.

Nicola Griffith

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

Nicola Griffith

#12. 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.

Nicola Griffith

#13. 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.

Nicola Griffith

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

Nicola Griffith

#15. 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.

Nicola Griffith

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

Nicola Griffith

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

Nicola Griffith

#18. 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.

Nicola Griffith

#19. 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.

Nicola Griffith

#20. 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.

Nicola Griffith