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" I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious. "

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" The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy. "

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

" I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life. "

" It's a lovely feeling, just working away at the desk, putting words down, building words up... I think you have to be aware that what you're doing is not just a private act, it's a societal thing. "

" 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. "

" I am a feminist, although I always worry saying that because you then get people asking you about the 1970s. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Set in a nameless colonial country, in an unspecified era, Katie Kitamura's second novel tracks the fortunes of a landowning family during the first waves of civil unrest. "

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

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

" Show, don't tell, is a mantra repeated by tutors of creative writing courses the world over. As advice for amateurs, it is sound and helps avoid character profiling, unactivated scenes, and broken narrative frames. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power. "

" I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown. "

" My work is of me; it's not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am. "

" 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. "

" Swimming in the U.K. is not really about enjoying a sultry experience. It's about cold, clear acts of purification, and constitutional durability. It's about invigoration and bravado. "

" 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. "

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

" For its speculations to be taken seriously, dystopian fiction must be part of a discussion of contemporary society, a projection of ongoing political failures perhaps, or the wringing of present jeopardy for future disaster. "