Quotes from Steven Hall

A movement unlocked my attention. I re-focused my eyes, looking past the vodka glass and into the static buzz of the TV. I stayed very still for a few seconds before lowering the glass to the floor, careful not to take my eyes off the screen. There was something distant and alive in the depths of the white noise - a living glide of thoughts swimming forward, a moving body of concepts and half felt images.

Almost sixteen weeks after I'd woken up on the bedroom floor, the lightbulb box arrived.

If you want your boomerang to come back, first you've got to throw it.

It's tiring not knowing people isn't it? Clio said later. It isn't word efficient, I agreed.

Timelessness again, the house like a secret temple as dust built up on things that were never meant to have dust on them - Clee's toothbrush and hairdryer and left-out-of-the-box CDs and deodorant on the bathroom window ledge. Ordinary things carefully kept in place because the last person to touch them would never put a cup down on the edge of the table again, or ever leave a book half-read.

How could I sit here and ask this stranger to help me pick up the facts of my life? The shopping bags had burst and all my things were rolling out over a packed pavement with me scurrying after them, stooping and bumping and tripping: Excuse me, I'm sorry. Could you just...Excuse me.

I loved her, Eric. So much. And she died. I only get the general sense of things and they pass so quickly, like childhood smells touching you and then being gone on the breeze. But. But but but. It feels strange to be writing this down - I think I believed I could change what happened, undo it, prevent it, save her life somehow after she was already gone. Of course I couldn't. Dead is dead is dead.

Ouch,' she mumbles. 'Somebody's superglued my joints.

One of the coolest things about touring around, actually, is getting to meet people, and getting to pick up on things that other people like. So many times, people come up to me after a reading and say, 'You must have read this,' or 'You must have seen this,' or 'Do you listen to this?' Usually I haven't.

I'd love a signed first edition of 'City of Glass' by Paul Auster. My favourite book of all time.

Are Simon & Garfunkel cool, or are they just really uncool? I can't decide.

Longhand isn't well suited to my way of writing. I tend to end up with dozens of pages of crossings-out and margin scribbles just to find one good paragraph, and it's easy to lose your train of thought, working like that.

I think there's a danger of becoming too familiar with things, isn't there? That you kind of, when you're used to seeing the same things every day, you see those things come what may, and you don't see maybe the interesting things just slightly out of view behind them.

She had a disapproving look that was just a little exaggerated; if you look carefully at that look, you can spot a smile that hangs around its edges and usually draw it out.

The word is the atom of the mind

I have an old note written by me before I got so vague which says that some of the great and most complicated stories like the Thousand and One Nights are very old protection puzzles, or even idea nets by which ancient peoples would fish for and catch the smaller conceptual fish.

o There's no way to really preserve a person when they've gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth, it's just a story. Stories are all we're ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.

Our universe will not see out its days by barrelling towards some big, climactic, Revelations-style ending, but by slouching through an increasingly meaningless jumble of dispersing elements, then limping on towards the most bland, uniform, entirely generic middle you can possibly imaginable, and dying there.

Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there's not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago. Everything is changing.

Even if it could speak, its stories would have no unfolding of events, no beginnings or endings, just one senseless, single-syllable cacophony of middle.

Our place in the universe, the universe itself, it all changes faster and faster by the second. Every one of us standing on this planet, we're all moving forwards and we're never ever coming back. The truth is, stillness is an idea, a dream. It's the thought of friendly, welcoming lights still shining in all the places we've been forced to abandon.

Without a story there is no meaning. And the nature of the meaning depends on the nature of the story. To understand this is to understand the true power of stories. And so, to control the stories, to be the one doing the telling... Well now, wouldn't that be quite a thing...?

But I'm old now and Ward has made himself rich and powerful. He has the resources to ensure that one day he'll perfect his standardising system and if that happens, instead of a thousand Wards there will be a hundred thousand, a million, a billion. He'll grow exponentially until there's nothing and no one else left. Just Ward, Ward, Ward in every house, in every town and every city, in every country in the world. Forever.

There's no way to really preserve a person when they've gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth; it's just a story. Stories are all we're ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.