Quotes from Sarah Hall

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.

I'm a home-roamer and can't do study or office scenarios.

I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum.

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.

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.

You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Swimming in the cold and the dark of British autumn is not for the faint-hearted.

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.

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'm very aware of modern countryside issues, such as rewilding: how, as science progresses, we begin to understand that a healthy ecosystem is multiform.

James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.

A lot of my literature deals with these people who are somehow magnetic because they have that ability to step over lines.

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.

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.

I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life.

You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.

My work is of me; it's not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am.

I am a feminist, although I always worry saying that because you then get people asking you about the 1970s.

I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women.

When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop.