Top 67 Susan Hill Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Eucalyptus. Murray Bail. Someone told me that this was a great novel so I bought it, but then I discovered that it was great Australian novel so I put it away. I find it difficult to get to grips with Australian novels. Difficult, but not impossible.
Susan Hill
#3. 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
#4. I wrote ghost stories because I'd always enjoyed reading them, and they seemed to be fizzling out ... I don't take them terribly seriously. It's like a cake, with ingredients.
Susan Hill
#5. My head reeled at the sheer and startling beauty, the wide, bare openness of it. The sense of space, the vastness of the sky above and on either side made my heart race, I would have travelled a thousand miles to see this. I had never imagined such a place.
Susan Hill
#6. There is a continuity about the garden and an order of succession in the garden year which is deeply pleasing, and in one sense there are no breaks or divisions - seed time flows on to flowering time and harvest time; no sooner is one thing dying than another is coming to life.
Susan Hill
#7. 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
#8. There were some things I could never begin to know about.
Susan Hill
#9. 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
#11. ...I was forced to live through it all, every minute and then every day thereafter...
Susan Hill
#12. It is okay to climb as long as you are not afraid, because being afraid is what made you fall
Susan Hill
#13. Suggested Reading Louis Bayard, The Black Tower; Sarah Blake, Grange House; F. G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls; Michael Cox, The Glass of Time; Mark Frost, The List of Seven; John Harwood, The Ghost Writer; Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale.
Susan Hill
#14. I was taught to whistle as a little girl by an undertaker. I used to sit in his workshop, watching him planing wood for the coffins, and he used to whistle all the time - and eventually I started whistling, too. I can whistle anything, particularly trumpet tunes from Classic FM.
Susan Hill
#15. I had been right, this was just the sort of place where superstition and tittle-tattle were rife, and even allowed to hold sway over commonsense. Now,
Susan Hill
#16. 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
#17. Theology is endlessly interesting in that you can study it without believing in anything. I do believe, but you don't have to. I got very caught up in the 11th-century monasticism and the Cistercians. My dissertation was about Aelred of Rievaulx and one of his books.
Susan Hill
#18. I was frightened of myself, I seemed to have no control over my thoughts and feelings, it was like a sort of madness...
Susan Hill
#19. 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
#20. Memory is like a long, dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. And then one plunges into the dark stretch again.
Susan Hill
#21. I'm really quite hard to scare so it was about mining times when I have jumped, and what creeps me out.
Susan Hill
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I collect Victorian automata and coming across them in the dark does give you a little shudder.
Susan Hill
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. The New Testament is about loving other people as you love yourself. That means caring for them and looking after them and being kind to them.
Susan Hill
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.
Susan Hill
#31. ...the past still held secrets, the past threw its shadows...
Susan Hill
#32. The key word for my book The Woman in Black is unsettling ... because you're not terrified all of the time or even frightened, but you're unsettled and once you're unsettled, then the door's open.
Susan Hill
#33. Films always make everyone else rich save the author.
Susan Hill
#34. It would be difficult to write a convincing ghost story set on a sunny day in a big city.
Susan Hill
#35. 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
#36. Love has an enormous number of connotations, and if somebody is a person who does kind acts as a way of life, if they are generally disposed to being caring and loving and doing things for other people, then kindness is a much stronger word than we make it out to be.
Susan Hill
#37. 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
#38. Of all human activities, apart from the procreation of children, gardening is the most optimistic and hopeful. The gardener is by definition one who plans for and believes and trusts in a future, whether in the short or the longer term.
Susan Hill
#40. I would act, pretend, and the pretense would become real.
Susan Hill
#41. 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
#42. In another life I would be a medievalist. I loved Chaucer, far more than Shakespeare.
Susan Hill
#43. There are some temptations that cannot be resisted, some lessons we never learn.
Susan Hill
#44. I had changed, and gone on changing, but I did not fully remember how it had begun, or understand why.
Susan Hill
#45. ...everything had changed, and she had crumpled in front of me, and become wholly broken and lost...
Susan Hill
#46. No, no, you have none of you any idea. This is all nonsense, fantasy, it is not like this. Nothing so blood-curdling and becreepered and crude - not so ... so laughable. The truth is quite other, and altogether more terrible.
Susan Hill
#47. A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.
Susan Hill
#48. Ghost stories ... tell us about things that lie hidden within all of us, and which lurk outside all around us.
Susan Hill
#49. Once you finish a book, you let it go out into the world to seek its fortune.
Susan Hill
#50. 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
#51. The moment had gone. I carried my secrets still with me, and they were hard, heavy, bitter things.
Susan Hill
#52. I like going into a school matinee. I like to be behind the stage because there's a spy-hole and what you see is the best moment in all theatre.
Susan Hill
#53. Without turning prison life into something more meaningful, prisoners are more likely to reoffend.
Susan Hill
#54. I had not yet learned that we make our own destiny, it springs from within us. It is not the outward events but what we allow ourselves to make of them that count.
Susan Hill
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Kindness is a sort of love without being love.
Susan Hill
#58. Your world may think what it chooses...but really, opinion and gossip count for nothing at all against truth...
Susan Hill
#59. How many selves do we contain, like Russian dolls concealed within one another.
Susan Hill
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#65. I don't really do jolly. I don't know why, I just don't.
Susan Hill
#66. 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
#67. 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
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