Top 82 Quotes & Sayings by Sarah Hall
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English novelist Sarah Hall.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.
I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum.
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.
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.
I think you can tell any human story in a particular place.
I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers.
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.
You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.
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.
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.
There's nothing like the vast, dark Atlantic to remind you of your mortality. But terror can also be exhilarating.
You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.
Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy.
Our lives are politically wound.
Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power.
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.
A lot of my literature deals with these people who are somehow magnetic because they have that ability to step over lines.
I'm a home-roamer and can't do study or office scenarios.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am a feminist, although I always worry saying that because you then get people asking you about the 1970s.
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.
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.
I've always been interested in the history of radical feminism - what happened to those women of the 1960s and '70s.
I don't think practitioners should necessarily be advertising their work.
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.
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.
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.
I wander around the house and write in bed, at the kitchen table, by the window, in the yard.
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.
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.
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.
I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious.
My work is of me; it's not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am.
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.
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.
James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.
I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.
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.
I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist.
The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.
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.
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.
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.
The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared.
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.
For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary.
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