Quotes from Susan Hill

One of the best presents anyone can give you is the name of a writer whose books they believe will be 'you' – and they are. Someone you would almost certainly never have found for yourself. They expand your horizons, they enrich you, they lead you forward, they chime with truths you already know and confirm them, they share new truths of their own with you.

I had changed, and gone on changing, but I did not fully remember how it had begun, or understand why.

everything had changed, and she had crumpled in front of me, and become wholly broken and lost...

The moment had gone. I carried my secrets still with me, and they were hard, heavy, bitter things.

We make our own destiny.

The business was beginning to sound like something from a Victorian novel, with a reclusive old woman having hidden a lot of ancient documents somewhere in the depths of her cluttered house.

There were some things I could never begin to know about.

We are not punished for our sins, we are punished by them. We can't live with guilt for the whole of our lives..

They are telling ghost stories." "Yes," said Will, his voice unsteady with both excitement and laughter. "Just the thing for Christmas Eve. It's an ancient tradition!

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.

Bereavement, she had discovered, was about many things, but one of those, and the one which few people seemed to know or warn about, was a long-lasting, overwhelming physical and mental tiredness.

he was keeping a close eye out for another episode from Mick Herron's anti-hero Jackson Lamb in his run-down department of espionage situated on the wrong side of the tracks.

I tried to imagine her as the mother of a child, but simply could not. I felt sorry for any offspring she might produce.

I have always believed that places with a long history, especially those in which terrible events have taken place, retain something of those times, some trace in the air.

In a curious way, it was her fearfulness that persuaded me that I must retain control of myself, rather as a mother will feel obliged to put a brave face on things in order to calm her frightened child.

And then, standing among the trunks of the fruit trees, silver-grey in the moonlight, I recalled that the way to banish an old ghost that continues its hauntings is to exorcise it. Well then, mine should be exorcised. I should tell my tale, not aloud, by the fireside, not as a diversion for idle listeners – it was too solemn, and too real, for that. But I should set it down on paper, with every care and in every detail. I would write my own ghost story.

Places are often filled with their own pasts and exude a sense of them, an atmosphere of great good or great evil, which can be picked up by anyone sensitive to their surroundings.

I allowed myself to give way, to slip down into this mindless state, which was as inchoate as the fog outside, and there to rest, wallow and find, if not peace, at least a certain relief in the suspension of all extremes of emotion.

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.

By the next war, the message will have got through. There will never be another war. There will always be wars. Men couldn't be so stupid, John! After all this? Isn't the only real purpose of our being here to teach them that lesson - how bloody useless and pointless the whole thing is? Men are naturally stupid and they do not learn from experience.

But gradually I discovered for myself the truth of the axiom that a man cannot remain indefinitely in a state of active terror. Either the emotion will increase until, at the prompting of more and more dreadful events and apprehensions, he is so overcome by it that he runs away or goes mad; or he will become by slow degrees less agitated and more in possession of himself.

I felt heavy and sick in my head, stale and tired and jangled too, my nerves and my imagination were all on edge.

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.

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.