Quotes from Susan Hill

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.

In another life I would be a medievalist. I loved Chaucer, far more than Shakespeare.

It would be difficult to write a convincing ghost story set on a sunny day in a big city.

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.

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.

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.

Films always make everyone else rich save the author.

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.

Certainly with a book, people are going to be able to read it and give themselves permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified because they're in a safe place while they're reading. That's what you can rely on as a writer, that people can let themselves be really frightened because they're really all right.

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.

Once you finish a book, you let it go out into the world to seek its fortune.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Flashback in film rarely works.

Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.

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.

I'm not one of those people who hates Amazon because they're big. Why pay a third more for the same thing?

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.

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.

Mo?na oskar?y? czÅ'owieka o tchórzostwo, jeÅ›li ucieka przed wszelkiego rodzaju fizycznymi zagro?eniami. Ale gdy ju? nie tylko jego bezpieczeÅ"stwu i dobremu samopoczuciu, ale wrÄ™cz jego zdrowiu i jego najtajniejszemu jestestwu zaczynajÄ… zagra?a? zjawiska nadprzyrodzone, bezcielesne i niewytÅ'umaczalne, wtedy odwrót jest oznakÄ… nie sÅ'aboÅ›ci, ale tego, ?e wybraÅ' rozsÄ…dnÄ… liniÄ™ postÄ™powania.

It was nine-thirty on Christmas Eve. As I crossed the long entrance hall of Monk's Piece on my way from the dining room, where we had just enjoyed the first of the happy, festive meals, toward the drawing room and the fire around which my family were now assembled, I paused and then, as I often do in the course of an evening, went to the front door, opened it and stepped outside.

I walked up the stairs and hesitated at the open door.