Quotes from Diane Setterfield

Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.

One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.

I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

Writing is more about discovery than invention.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy

My liking for Scandinavian crime fiction led me into exploring literary writers from the same countries.

For several decades, I believed it was necessary to be extraordinary if you wanted to write, and since I wasn't, I gave up my ambition and settled down to a life of reading.

Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued "Jane Eyre" over the anonymous stranger...Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life.

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.

You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it's really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.

What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?

People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.

The addictive pleasure of abandoning yourself to a book, of losing consciousness of your worries, your body, and your surroundings, to become a ghost haunting other worlds has influenced me in many ways.

I have kept a reading diary since I was 18. I am jealous of my friend who has kept hers since she was ten.

Excessively narrow reading is unhelpful, certainly. Reading only Serious Literature is no better than reading only trash in this respect.

I see people as haunted by the selves they don't know... I don't have children, but I have nieces and nephews, and one thing I notice is how fascinated they are by stories of their lives before they can remember.

We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives.

... [They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks.

Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.

When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.

Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.

To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.

Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head.