Quotes from Sarah Waters

I love film and, particularly, shorts. You don't get to see them often, and they're a great little form, like a short story.

I've ended up feeling fonder of 'The Paying Guests' than of any of my other novels.

The early '20s were like the waist of an hourglass. Lots of things were hurtling toward it and squeezing through it and then hurtling out the other side.

I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.

There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged.

Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether it's terrorism or global financial meltdown or climate change - huge things that affect us deeply, and yet things about which we can do, individually, very little.

It was a great childhood. We weren't especially wealthy or anything, but I felt I had a kind of safety and freedom.

The relationship you have with your mother is like nothing else. They do kind of know everything about you, even though they don't confront it. That is often a dynamic from childhood onwards. As a teenager, you want to be independent and do slightly furtive things.

When theatre works, it's like nothing else, and when it doesn't, which is often, it's excruciating. It's perhaps not so excruciating when a novel goes wrong, but there is a kind of magic that can and should happen.

life is crap but, every day is an experience

My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.

She closed her eyes and let the rain fall on her face, and after another second, I could not have said what were raindrops, and what tears.

life is crap but, every day is an experience

You smell,' she began, slowly and wonderingly, 'like -' 'Like a herring!'I said bitterly. My cheeks were hot now and very red; there were tears, almost, in my eyes. I think she saw my confusion and was sorry for it. 'Not at all like a herring,' she said gently.'But perhaps, maybe, like a mermaid...

Weep all the artful tears you like. You shall never make my hard heart the softer.

It was only later that I wondered about it and tried to look back. But by then I could only see that there was once a time when we had walked apart; and then a time when we walked together.

The bad blood rose in me, just like wine.

clad not exactly as a boy but, rather confusingly, as the boy I would have been, had I been more of a girl

There is no patience so terrible as that of the deranged.

One time, two years ago, I took a draught of morphia, meaning to end my life. My mother found me before the life was ended, the doctor drew the poison from my stomach with a syringe, and when I woke, it was to the sound of my own weeping. For I had hoped to open my eyes on Heaven, where my father was; and they had only pulled me back to Hell.

She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery to become charged. Yes, that was it, she thought, as she turned a corner: it wasn't a liquid creeping, it was a tingle, something electric, something produced as if by the friction of her shoes against the streets. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments.

PIGEON MY ARSE!

Oh, for shame! Nancy, have you never seen Florrie's face in a chrysanthemum, or a rose?' 'Never.' I said. 'Though there was a flounder for sale on a fishmonger's barrow, in Whitechapel yesterday, and the likeness was quite uncanny. I very nearly brought it home...

But he was not like Walter, who might take his pleasure where he chose it. His pleasure had turned, at the last, to a kind of grief; and his love was a love so fierce and so secret it must be satisfied, with a stranger, in a reeking court like this. I knew about that kind of love. I knew how it was to bare your palpitating heart, and be fearful as you did so that the beats should come too loudly, and betray you.