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" I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist. "

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" 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? "

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

" It's been noted that writing about the production of art is a masquerade or metaphor for writing about writing. This may be true, there are similarities - both the verbal and the visual represent the thing or the concept. "

" 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. "

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

" I have ideas. I hear voices. Words accumulate. It's still an overriding impulse. And I'm self-employed, which means I have to be sensible and motivated about paying the bills. "

" 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. "

" Apex predators are good for an environment in terms of biodiversity and trophic cascade - we have very few. But realistically, only a few areas could sustain free-roaming wolves in Britain, mostly in Scotland. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I'm very aware of modern countryside issues, such as rewilding: how, as science progresses, we begin to understand that a healthy ecosystem is multiform. "

" 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. "

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

" One of the things I try to do with my writing is try to evoke the spirit of the place. I think these things imprint on the landscape and the culture. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" Our lives are politically wound. "

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

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