Quotes from Susanna Clarke

Nothing, I find, has prepared me for the sight of my own characters walking about. A playwright or screenwriter must expect it; a novelist doesn't and naturally concludes that she has gone mad.

I always really liked magicians. I'm not even sure why - except that they know things other people don't, and they live in untidy rooms full of strange objects.

A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.

I first became an Alan Moore fan in Covent Garden on a Saturday afternoon in 1987, when I bought a copy of 'Watchmen,' his graphic novel about ageing superheroes and nuclear apocalypse.

It's not easy to convey to someone who doesn't read comics just how Alan Moore has dominated the field since 'Watchmen.'

'Pride and Prejudice' is often compared to 'Cinderella,' but Jane Austen's real 'Cinderella' tale is 'Mansfield Park.'

I had always been fascinated by comics, but it had taken me several weeks to make up my mind to buy 'Watchmen'; for someone on a publisher's assistant's salary, it was some quite unheard-of sum of money.

You can get this feeling of the English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh fairy, but it is by nature very elusive. It would be possible to pin down a German fairy, but the English one just vanishes, becomes the shadow under the trees.

In some ways, 'Mansfield Park' is 'Pride and Prejudice' turned inside out.

Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.

I can write most places. I particularly like writing on trains. Being between places is quite liberating, and looking out of the window, watching a procession of landscapes and random-ish objects, is very good for stories.

It seemed to me that you make magic real by making it a little prosaic, a little difficult and disappointing - never quite as glamorous as the other characters imagine.

There must come a time when the bullets will run out

Alan Moore is a peculiarly unsung triumph of British culture, and Northampton, where he was born in 1953, the son of brewery worker Ernest and printer Sylvia, is where you must go to find him.

There is nothing in the world so easy to explain as failure - it is, after all, what everybody does all the time.

Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching, and live like it's heaven on earth.

I have a scholar's love of silence and solitude. To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.

Well, I suppose one ought not to employ a magician and then complain that he does not behave like other people.

Perhaps that is what it is like being with other people. Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not. Perhaps that is what Raphael means.

It [Ashfair House] was an old fashioned house—the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in.

What nobility of feeling! To sacrifice your own pleasure to preserve the comfort of others! It is a thing, I confess, that would never occur to me.

My last thought before I fell asleep was: He is dead. My only friend. My only enemy.

I have been quite put out of temper this morning and someone ought to die for it.

It is also true that his hair had a reddish tinge and, as everybody knows, no one with red hair can ever truly be said to be handsome.