My work is of me; it's not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am.
— Sarah Hall
Writing, and its theatre of operation, is better than working shifts packing frozen sausages; that's all I need to think about if I'm having difficulties.
I felt impelled to write. It felt demonic, and I wanted to improve, the way some people habitually pick up a guitar and get better at playing it and making up songs.
I was brought up in the north of England, which is probably no rougher than anywhere else, but I remember as a child being kind of mesmerized by girls fighting on the playground.
James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.
I can gabble on now, but I couldn't when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time in my own head on the moors by myself. It felt like writing was the right way to express myself.
You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.
I am a feminist, although I always worry saying that because you then get people asking you about the 1970s.
I have ideas. I hear voices. Words accumulate. It's still an overriding impulse. And I'm self-employed, which means I have to be sensible and motivated about paying the bills.
My writing is called exotic or avant-garde because I write about rural places. Has it really come to this, that if you write about the country you are avant-garde? How did this happen? Modern agriculture and spaces are still so relevant.
A lot of my literature deals with these people who are somehow magnetic because they have that ability to step over lines.
I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.
I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum.
Our lives are politically wound.
The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.
I don't reckon there are many writers who start out really expecting writing to be an attainable occupation. Well, I didn't. It was a pipe dream.
One of the things I try to do with my writing is try to evoke the spirit of the place. I think these things imprint on the landscape and the culture.
I'm a home-roamer and can't do study or office scenarios.
For about two years, while researching 'The Wolf Border,' I was a complete wolf bore. I would regurgitate everything I was researching, whether people were interested or not.
I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off.
I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious.
