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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“One thing I will say, they often take it better than a man. Pain, that is. Probably the residue of tolerance from when they were all bloody witches and got stoned or burned or drowned for it, eh lad? Never tell your mother I said that, by the way.”

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

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

“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?”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“The two of you are different now, calmer. There is still sex, occasionally, but is no longer a priority to seduce or be seduced by him.”

“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.”

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