Quotes from Susanna Clarke

Woods were ringed with a colour so soft, so subtle that it could scarcely be said to be a colour at all. It was more the idea of a colour - as if the trees were dreaming green dreams or thinking green thoughts.

Magic, madam, is like wine and, if you are not used to it, it will make you drunk.

He gave her his heart. She took it and placed it quietly in the pocket of her gown. No one observed what she did.

How quickly was every bad thing discovered to be the fault of the previous administration (an evil set of men who wedded general stupidity to wickedness of purpose).

I feel very much at home in the early nineteenth century and am not inclined to leave it.

It's funny, because I don't think of myself as a novelist. I think of myself as a writer.

I tell stories. I kind of stumbled on that by trying to combine Jane Austen and magic.

She doesn't do the things heroines are supposed to. Which is rather Jane Austen's point - Fanny is her subversive heroine. She is gentle and self-doubting and utterly feminine; and given the right circumstances, she would defy an army.

I always start out saying exactly what everybody looks like. I don't know why.