Diane Setterfield
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.
I am always happy up a ladder with a paintbrush in my hand. And I wish I had more time to spend in the garden - not least because I get good ideas for writing when I'm out there.
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.
I have kept a reading diary since I was 18. I am jealous of my friend who has kept hers since she was ten.
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.
My mother says that after I first visited the home of the man I later married, she knew it was serious when I told her, 'Mum, he has more books than me!' So, books are at the very heart of my life.
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.
We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives.
Excessively narrow reading is unhelpful, certainly. Reading only Serious Literature is no better than reading only trash in this respect.
My liking for Scandinavian crime fiction led me into exploring literary writers from the same countries.
There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.Collection: Moving
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 joyCollection: Reading
I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.Collection: Reality
Of course I loved books more than people.Collection: Book
Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)Collection: Baby
My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.Collection: Running
A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.Collection: Broken
But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.Collection: Silence
A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.Collection: Stories
As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.Collection: Alive
There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.Collection: Book
A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.Collection: Stories
I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. - Vida WinterCollection: Children
Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.Collection: Once Upon A Time
When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.Collection: Void
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.Collection: Children
For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.Collection: Way
There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.Collection: Hands
The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.Collection: Morning
My mother and I were like two continents moving slowly but inexorably apart; my father, the bridge builder, constantly extending the fragile edifice he had constructed to connect us.Collection: Mother
There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name.Collection: Names
In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.Collection: Kindness
Reading can be dangerous.Collection: Reading
There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small ideas.Collection: Single Mom
Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?Collection: Past
People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.Collection: Integrity
I shall start at the beginning. Though of coarse, the beginning is never where you think it is.Collection: Thinking
And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.Collection: Art
Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they're not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.Collection: Reading
Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families 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. - Vida WinterCollection: Winter
Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.Collection: Book
I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.Collection: Simple
But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears and she was transformed.Collection: Beautiful
Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in 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.Collection: Book
For it must be very lonely being dead.Collection: Lonely
What better place to kill time than a library?Collection: Library
What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?Collection: Book
She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.Collection: Mean
Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.Collection: Book
People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.Collection: Ambition