Susan Hill

“Yorkshire is so much part of me.”

“Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.”

“The New Testament is about loving other people as you love yourself. That means caring for them and looking after them and being kind to them.”

“I was an only child who was never really good at anything else. I had no other option. I could write; I wanted to write; I wrote. Otherwise, I was unemployable.”

“I have only read very classic traditional English ghost stories, other than Henry James, who wrote some magnificent short ones as well as the longer 'Turn of the Screw.' He, Dickens, and M.R. James are my influences.”

“It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.”

“I don't really do jolly. I don't know why, I just don't.”

“Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.”

“We make our own destiny.”

“I'm not one of those people who hates Amazon because they're big. Why pay a third more for the same thing?”

“I was frightened of myself, I seemed to have no control over my thoughts and feelings, it was like a sort of madness...”

“Once you finish a book, you let it go out into the world to seek its fortune.”

“Without turning prison life into something more meaningful, prisoners are more likely to reoffend.”

“I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.”

“Small children will talk to anyone, once the guard of shyness has fallen, and they have, like the elderly, a sense of immediacy, a need to say or do something, now, now, the minute it is thought of, combined with that other sense, of the complete irrelevance of time.”

“I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.”

“Kindness is a sort of love without being love.”

“I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.”

“I had changed, and gone on changing, but I did not fully remember how it had begun, or understand why.”

“Theology is endlessly interesting in that you can study it without believing in anything. I do believe, but you don't have to. I got very caught up in the 11th-century monasticism and the Cistercians. My dissertation was about Aelred of Rievaulx and one of his books.”