Sarah Hall Quotes

#1. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#2. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#3. I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off. - Author: Sarah Hall

#4. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#5. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#6. We endorse the manmade competition between ourselves that disunites us, striping us of our true ability. We don't believe we can govern better, and until we believe this, we never will. It's time for a new society. - Author: Sarah Hall

#7. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#8. I don't think practitioners should necessarily be advertising their work. - Author: Sarah Hall

#9. Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required. - Author: Sarah Hall

#10. 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? - Author: Sarah Hall

#11. He told her the flowers in her painting contained exactly the purple substance of the flowers on the desk in front of her [ ... ] Let us open the window and see if your painting can entice the butterflies. - Author: Sarah Hall

#12. Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy. - Author: Sarah Hall

#13. I have ideas. I hear voices. Words accumulate. It's still an overriding impulse. And I'm self-employed, which means I have to be sensible and motivated about paying the bills. - Author: Sarah Hall

#14. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#15. I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first. - Author: Sarah Hall

#16. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#17. Our lives are politically wound. - Author: Sarah Hall

#18. People went through life like well handled jugs, collecting chips and scrapes and stains from wear and tear, from holding and pouring life. - Author: Sarah Hall

#19. For about two years, while researching 'The Wolf Border,' I was a complete wolf bore. I would regurgitate everything I was researching, whether people were interested or not. - Author: Sarah Hall

#20. 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! - Author: Sarah Hall

#21. That boy may have been born on third base but he sure as shit ain't scored a triple. - Author: Sarah Hall

#22. The two of you are different now, calmer. There is still sex, occasionally, but is no longer a priority to seduce or be seduced by him. - Author: Sarah Hall

#23. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#24. The man had added to his body in a way that was brave and timeless and beyond adornment. - Author: Sarah Hall

#25. There's nothing like the vast, dark Atlantic to remind you of your mortality. But terror can also be exhilarating. - Author: Sarah Hall

#26. You didn't understand what he was saying, until he kissed you. It was a kiss of such complicity, of such uncomplicated sympathy, that you felt for the first time not alone in your suffering. - Author: Sarah Hall

#27. Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers. - Author: Sarah Hall

#28. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#29. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#30. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#31. Personal effects: how irrelevant they are, how sad, how lost, how vagrant, without the force that gives them purpose. - Author: Sarah Hall

#32. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#33. Of all the conditions we experience, solitude is perhaps the most misunderstood. - Author: Sarah Hall

#34. Prescient experts of biological codes. - Author: Sarah Hall

#35. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#36. When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop. - Author: Sarah Hall

#37. I said, it's strange, each time I see you again. You look different. Altered. You're not like I remember. I have to get used to you. - Author: Sarah Hall

#38. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#39. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#40. Life is not straightforward: relationships bifurcate; there is nothing more complicated, more confounding, than love. - Author: Sarah Hall

#41. Let him join the men of the past. Her old lovers were ghosts. None of them had survived; none were missed. - Author: Sarah Hall

#42. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#43. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#44. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#45. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#46. I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious. - Author: Sarah Hall

#47. There are men who make the world seem populated by good men, those who are intuitive, or have been taught. - Author: Sarah Hall

#48. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#49. You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance. - Author: Sarah Hall

#50. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#51. Those partial to drink were hiding faults and dishonesty. They were sloppy souls, even the ones with pleasant manners and fine noses. - Author: Sarah Hall

#52. All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It's the law of paternal disenchantments. - Author: Sarah Hall

#53. The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared. - Author: Sarah Hall

#54. You've been wondering lately when the moment is that somebody is truly lost to you. - Author: Sarah Hall

#55. I am a feminist, although I always worry saying that because you then get people asking you about the 1970s. - Author: Sarah Hall

#56. I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist. - Author: Sarah Hall

#57. Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form. - Author: Sarah Hall

#58. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#59. I can gabble on now, but I couldn't when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time in my own head on the moors by myself. It felt like writing was the right way to express myself. - Author: Sarah Hall

#60. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#61. James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for. - Author: Sarah Hall

#62. Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode. - Author: Sarah Hall

#63. My work is of me; it's not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am. - Author: Sarah Hall

#64. The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath. - Author: Sarah Hall

#65. I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life. - Author: Sarah Hall

#66. Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them. - Author: Sarah Hall

#67. Life conspires to plant us in the funniest of gardens where the trees need an especial form of tending - Author: Sarah Hall

#68. A lot of my literature deals with these people who are somehow magnetic because they have that ability to step over lines. - Author: Sarah Hall

#69. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#70. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#71. I think you can tell any human story in a particular place. - Author: Sarah Hall

#72. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#73. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#74. Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments. - Author: Sarah Hall

#75. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#76. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#77. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#78. Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power. - Author: Sarah Hall

#79. A month in and it seemed to CY that he was an explorer summiting the foothill of an a bizarre and primitive island. - Author: Sarah Hall

#80. Swimming in the cold and the dark of British autumn is not for the faint-hearted. - Author: Sarah Hall

#81. 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 - Author: Sarah Hall

#82. People were made up of shit and piss and phlegm and bits and pieces of experience. - Author: Sarah Hall

#83. There is always half a truth in cliche. - Author: Sarah Hall

#84. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#85. You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone. - Author: Sarah Hall

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

#87. This is your first and final chance, your one and only biography. - Author: Sarah Hall

#88. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#89. I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum. - Author: Sarah Hall

#90. For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary. - Author: Sarah Hall

#91. 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. - Author: Sarah Hall

#92. I wander around the house and write in bed, at the kitchen table, by the window, in the yard. - Author: Sarah Hall

#93. I'm a home-roamer and can't do study or office scenarios. - Author: Sarah Hall

#94. I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women. - Author: Sarah Hall

#95. You think back and you ask yourself why you became so interested in wolves. I think it was because when I was very small, growing up in a little hamlet near Shap, we would go to Lowther Wildlife Park for birthday parties. Now closed, it was only three miles from my parents' house. - Author: Sarah Hall

#96. It's taken me 15 years to feel I might be able to write and publish short stories, and for the assiduous checks of the industry to allow some through. - Author: Sarah Hall

#97. 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 - Author: Sarah Hall