Steven Hall Quotes

#1. I'm excited about how books work in a digital age. When you read a book, unlike a film, you are decoding symbols in order to 'see' the story, so it is collaborative in a way that a film can never be.

Steven Hall

#2. Almost sixteen weeks after I'd woken up on the bedroom floor, the lightbulb box arrived.

Steven Hall

#3. It's tiring not knowing people isn't it?" Clio said later.
It isn't word efficient," I agreed.

Steven Hall

#4. When I'm out and about, I'll text or email myself from my phone. A smart phone is a great tool for a writer.

Steven Hall

#5. He was a great man, my granddad, a very calm, logical and methodical guy. I suppose I'm trying to be more like him as I get older.

Steven Hall

#6. Longhand isn't well suited to my way of writing. I tend to end up with dozens of pages of crossings-out and margin scribbles just to find one good paragraph, and it's easy to lose your train of thought, working like that.

Steven Hall

#7. Everything that had happened was all part of the same great big something, it had to happen, I just knew

Steven Hall

#8. I don't listen to Nirvana plugged anymore. I think there's a whole group of people who have semi-forgotten that Nirvana used electric guitars because of the 'Unplugged' album. It's so great.

Steven Hall

#9. I love books that give you space to climb inside there. And you have to run to keep up in places, and you have to fill in a lot of blanks yourself. So it almost becomes your story.

Steven Hall

#10. Texas has no system in place, and what you have is chaos.

Steven Hall

#11. I think there's a danger of becoming too familiar with things, isn't there? That you kind of, when you're used to seeing the same things every day, you see those things come what may, and you don't see maybe the interesting things just slightly out of view behind them.

Steven Hall

#12. Already the dream was coming apart, its bright silk strands unwinding into nebulous emotions, little coloured clouds of feeling being dispersed by the movement of my waking-up mind. This is how it's always been with Light Bulb Fragment dreams; by the time I'm fully awake, they're gone.

Steven Hall

#13. Without a story there is no meaning.
And the nature of the meaning depends on the nature of the story.
To understand this is to understand the true power of stories.
And so, to control the stories, to be the one doing the telling...
Well now, wouldn't that be quite a thing...?

Steven Hall

#14. I have notebooks and sketchbooks for ideas. I also have drawers full of envelopes covered in quick outlines, scenes or scraps of dialogue that I don't want to forget. I tend to grab whatever's to hand and just get the thing down before it's lost. It's not what you would call a streamlined system.

Steven Hall

#15. Are Simon & Garfunkel cool, or are they just really uncool? I can't decide.

Steven Hall

#16. 'Homeward Bound.' I find myself listening to that tune a lot when I'm traveling. Sitting in a railway station, wanting to go home, carrying all your stuff with you.

Steven Hall

#17. The calmer and more well-ordered my desktop is, the more I can convince myself I'm on top of things.

Steven Hall

#18. I looked at her and a voice inside me said, we only see starlight because all the stars are bleeding.

Steven Hall

#19. Twitter is incredibly useful. It's a great example of how the Internet is changing the way we engage with information and text. Above all else, this change in the nature of engagement is fascinating for me as a writer.

Steven Hall

#20. A man lives so many different lengths of time. And each one has its own end.

Steven Hall

#21. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a palaeontologist. I wanted to dig up dinosaurs.

Steven Hall

#22. I'd love a signed first edition of 'City of Glass' by Paul Auster. My favourite book of all time.

Steven Hall

#23. I'm a bit suspicious of people who are narrow in their musical tastes.

Steven Hall

#24. There's nothing about the times when she wasn't funny or sexy, or when she talked too much or about her pissing or shitting. There's no way to really preserve a person when they're gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth, it's just a story.

Steven Hall

#25. They say life is tenacious. They say given half a chance, or less, life will grow and exist and evolve anywhere, even in the most inhospitable and unlikely of places.
Life will always find a way, they say.

Steven Hall

#26. Especially in quail hunting, where the hunter is so focused on the bird that it makes everything else blurry. The bottom line in terms of bird hunting is what we call shooting zones.

Steven Hall

#27. Geniuses don't go mad," he said. "That's what people don't understand. They get out so far out that the water is like glass and they can see for miles and see so much, and in ways people have never seen before.

Steven Hall

#28. We're all going forwards and we're never coming back.

Steven Hall

#29. I'm such a magpie. I'll get halfway through one thing and pick up something else. I always have 5 or 6 books open and spine-up by my bed: it's like a row of tents. I don't finish nearly as many books as I should.

Steven Hall

#30. The environmental assessment should give us the answers to all the issues that have been raised: potential lead migration, endangered species, noise abatement and proper disposal of shot, shells and things.

Steven Hall

#31. If you want your boomerang to come back, first you've got to throw it.

Steven Hall

#32. How could I sit here and ask this stranger to help me pick up the facts of my life? The shopping bags had burst and all my things were rolling out over a packed pavement with me scurrying after them, stooping and bumping and tripping: Excuse me, I'm sorry. Could you just ... Excuse me.

Steven Hall

#33. A cat is a responsibility after all. And feeding and keeping and caring about a stupid fat cat isn't much, isn't much in the entirety of what counts for being a person and the huge range of what people do,but it is something. It is something and it's something that's warm and that I still have.

Steven Hall

#34. Beer. It always seems like such a good idea at the time, doesn't it? What's worse is beer seems like an even better idea after you've had some beer.

Steven Hall

#35. Ouch,' she mumbles. 'Somebody's superglued my joints.

Steven Hall

#36. Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there's not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago.

Steven Hall