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

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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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? "

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

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