Susan Hill

“Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it.”

“In another life I would be a medievalist. I loved Chaucer, far more than Shakespeare.”

“Flashback in film rarely works.”

“I don't understand it when people get cross about how one of their works was adapted and say, 'Oh, they ruined it!' Well, the book is still there.”

“I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure.”

“Though they don't always have to be set in fog, weather is incredibly important in ghost stories. As is suspense: you've got to turn the screw very, very slowly.”

“I was taught to whistle as a little girl by an undertaker. I used to sit in his workshop, watching him planing wood for the coffins, and he used to whistle all the time - and eventually I started whistling, too. I can whistle anything, particularly trumpet tunes from Classic FM.”

“It would be difficult to write a convincing ghost story set on a sunny day in a big city.”

“Films always make everyone else rich save the author.”

“A lot of writers want everything put on screen, but it doesn't work like that. The screenwriter brings her own imaginative interpretation, just as the director and actors do.”

“If you were writing a short ghost story, I would say start very quietly and go, 'One, two, three jump.' Or start with a jump and make it jumpier. But with a long story, it must have rises and falls.”

“The one thing the Victorians really believed in was philanthropy. I think we've forgotten the obligation to be philanthropic. I think we need smaller government, but I want to make it clear I'm not the Sarah Palin of the Cotswolds.”

“Love has an enormous number of connotations, and if somebody is a person who does kind acts as a way of life, if they are generally disposed to being caring and loving and doing things for other people, then kindness is a much stronger word than we make it out to be.”

“Certainly with a book, people are going to be able to read it and give themselves permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified because they're in a safe place while they're reading. That's what you can rely on as a writer, that people can let themselves be really frightened because they're really all right.”

“They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.”

“I wrote ghost stories because I'd always enjoyed reading them, and they seemed to be fizzling out... I don't take them terribly seriously. It's like a cake, with ingredients.”