Sarah Hall Quotes

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.

- Sarah Hall

There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy.

- Sarah Hall

I've always been interested in wolves, since I was a child. There was a wolf enclosure in a wildlife park very close to where I was brought up; they were the main attraction.

- Sarah Hall

I was the feral, mud-bathing, tree-climbing variety of child. Why would I want to read about pirates when I could build a raft and terrorise sheep along the riverbanks?

- Sarah Hall

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.

- Sarah Hall

Set in a nameless colonial country, in an unspecified era, Katie Kitamura's second novel tracks the fortunes of a landowning family during the first waves of civil unrest.

- Sarah Hall

My favourite pool is located in a remote valley in the eastern Lake District, surrounded by vine-hung cliffs and slippery boulders. It has a torrential sheet waterfall at one end and is almost black in colour, so it appears bottomless, a portal to nowhere.

- 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.

- Sarah Hall

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.

- Sarah Hall

Over the years, I've lived in a variety of places, including America, but I was born and raised in the Lake District, in Cumbria. Growing up in that rural, sodden, mountainous county has shaped my brain, perhaps even my temperament.

- Sarah Hall

I wander around the house and write in bed, at the kitchen table, by the window, in the yard.

- Sarah Hall

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.

- Sarah Hall

Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers.

- Sarah Hall

When you are a kid, a wolf is an amazing sight, so sumptuous. I sort of knew these were splendid creatures, that I was not going to find them outside roaming around. It was like a dog, but not a dog. It was incredible, a god!

- Sarah Hall

Art history became an A-level option at my school the year I started sixth form. This happened because another student and I cajoled and bullied the head of the art department into arranging it with the examination board.

- Sarah Hall

I married an American. He was from the Pacific Northwest but went to law school in the South, so I was living in Virginia and North Carolina.

- Sarah Hall

When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop.

- Sarah Hall

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.

- Sarah Hall

Show, don't tell, is a mantra repeated by tutors of creative writing courses the world over. As advice for amateurs, it is sound and helps avoid character profiling, unactivated scenes, and broken narrative frames.

- Sarah Hall

Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.

- Sarah Hall

It's very interesting to me that the nationalist movement in Scotland has become so positive and self-reflective rather than anti-English. The referendum in 2014 was peaceful, for all its deeply and passionately divided people.

- Sarah Hall

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.

- Sarah Hall

Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them.

- Sarah Hall

Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy.

- Sarah Hall

I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power.

- Sarah Hall

Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.

- Sarah Hall

Apex predators are good for an environment in terms of biodiversity and trophic cascade - we have very few. But realistically, only a few areas could sustain free-roaming wolves in Britain, mostly in Scotland.

- Sarah Hall

It's a lovely feeling, just working away at the desk, putting words down, building words up... I think you have to be aware that what you're doing is not just a private act, it's a societal thing.

- Sarah Hall

Wonderful characters rotate around and through bookshops on a daily basis, competing with and possibly even triumphing over fiction when it comes to entertainment, strangeness and inspiration.

- Sarah Hall

I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.

- Sarah Hall

We all have our preferences - some people go for birds - but for me, there's just something about the wolf; the design of it is really aesthetically pleasing.

- Sarah Hall

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.

- Sarah Hall

In my early 20s, connecting with fiction was a difficult process. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to what was meaningful, what convinced, and what made sense.

- Sarah Hall

You think back and you ask yourself why you became so interested in wolves. I think it was because when I was very small, growing up in a little hamlet near Shap, we would go to Lowther Wildlife Park for birthday parties. Now closed, it was only three miles from my parents' house.

- Sarah Hall

For its speculations to be taken seriously, dystopian fiction must be part of a discussion of contemporary society, a projection of ongoing political failures perhaps, or the wringing of present jeopardy for future disaster.

- Sarah Hall

It's been noted that writing about the production of art is a masquerade or metaphor for writing about writing. This may be true, there are similarities - both the verbal and the visual represent the thing or the concept.

- Sarah Hall

The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared.

- Sarah Hall

For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary.

- Sarah Hall

I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.

- Sarah Hall

I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious.

- Sarah Hall

The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.

- Sarah Hall

Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped.

- Sarah Hall

Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode.

- Sarah Hall

Nightmares of a capital city overwhelmed by tsunami, war or plague transfix us, but catastrophe is first felt locally, and there are many homes outside the city.

- Sarah Hall

Swimming in the U.K. is not really about enjoying a sultry experience. It's about cold, clear acts of purification, and constitutional durability. It's about invigoration and bravado.

- Sarah Hall

James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.

- Sarah Hall

Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required.

- Sarah Hall

I'm a home-roamer and can't do study or office scenarios.

- Sarah Hall

Swimming in the cold and the dark of British autumn is not for the faint-hearted.

- Sarah Hall

A lot of my literature deals with these people who are somehow magnetic because they have that ability to step over lines.

- Sarah Hall

There's nothing like the vast, dark Atlantic to remind you of your mortality. But terror can also be exhilarating.

- Sarah Hall

Quite a lot is required of writers these days in terms of, if not promoting the work, then being a representative of the work. It's a difficult thing, really.

- Sarah Hall

It's taken me 15 years to feel I might be able to write and publish short stories, and for the assiduous checks of the industry to allow some through.

- Sarah Hall

I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off.

- Sarah Hall

I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist.

- Sarah Hall

I'm very aware of modern countryside issues, such as rewilding: how, as science progresses, we begin to understand that a healthy ecosystem is multiform.

- Sarah Hall

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.

- Sarah Hall

I am a feminist, although I always worry saying that because you then get people asking you about the 1970s.

- Sarah Hall

Our lives are politically wound.

- Sarah Hall

I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum.

- Sarah Hall

You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn't able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work.

- Sarah Hall

I've always been interested in the history of radical feminism - what happened to those women of the 1960s and '70s.

- Sarah Hall

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.

- Sarah Hall

I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women.

- Sarah Hall

Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power.

- Sarah Hall

I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life.

- Sarah Hall

You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.

- Sarah Hall

I don't think practitioners should necessarily be advertising their work.

- Sarah Hall

You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.

- Sarah Hall

My work is of me; it's not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am.

- Sarah Hall