Hannah Kent

“I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do as a money-making job.”

“Endless days of dark indoors and hateful glances are enough to set a rime on anyone’s bones.”

“I had an interest in Scandinavian countries because I'd never seen snow.”

“The mystery at the center of 'Burial Rites' is not who killed whom on the night of March 13, 1828. It is the mystery each of us encounters: Can we every truly know another? Can we ever truly know ourselves?”

“I don't like to pretend I was guided in any way by the supernatural world, but the more you talk about that, the easier it is to dismiss those notions.”

“Most writers are drawn to what is unknown, rather than what is clear in any tale.”

“My dad would tell me bedtime stories, and he used to always leave them open-ended and finish at a crucial point with the words, 'dream on'. Then it was my responsibility to finish the story as I was drifting off to sleep. We would call them dreaming stories.”

“There are secrets at the heart of every story; there is something that must be uncovered or discovered, both by the reader and by the characters.”

“You know you're going to have a good day when your morning begins with breakfast in the same room as Carrie Tiffany, David Vann and Lionel Shriver.”

“Believe me, Nóra. An old broom knows the dirty corners best”

“I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing 'Burial Rites,' I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.”

“Some folks are forced to the edges by their difference. (...) But 'tis at the edges that they find their power.”

“Poverty scrapes these homes down until they all look the same, and they all have in common the absence of things that ought to be there. I might as well have been at one place all my life.”

“I used to have 20/20 vision, believe it or not; that's gone because of all the reading I did when I wasn't supposed to, reading in the back of a car, waiting for each street light to go past so I could grab another sentence.”

“I still don't know why, exactly, but I do think people can have a spiritual connection to landscape, and I certainly did in Iceland.”

“When I write, I write for myself, and I have high expectations... so I'm just trying to meet those. I'm not going to distract myself with other people's expectations.”

“I prefer a story to a prayer.”

“I was a very imaginative child, and my parents were very encouraging of that. My sister and I would put on plays; I would write my own stories.”

“I had expected that at some point during the first draft a light would go on, and I would understand, finally, how to write a book. This never happened. The process was akin to blindly walking in the dark, feeling my way only by touch, and only recognising dead ends when I smacked into them.”

“I applied for funding to embark on an overseas field trip in Iceland, and spent six weeks there happily holed up in the national archives, museums and libraries, sifting through ministerial and parish records, censuses, maps, microfilm, logs, and local histories.”