Quotes from Diane Setterfield

I am always happy up a ladder with a paintbrush in my hand. And I wish I had more time to spend in the garden - not least because I get good ideas for writing when I'm out there.

My mother says that after I first visited the home of the man I later married, she knew it was serious when I told her, 'Mum, he has more books than me!' So, books are at the very heart of my life.

I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing.

No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

Of course I loved books more than people.

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

What better place to kill time than a library?

All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.

What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?

A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.

Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.

Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.

I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.

Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.

I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.

One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.

Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.

The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.

Reading can be dangerous.