Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think you can tell any human story in a particular place. "

" 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. "

" 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 like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 don't reckon there are many writers who start out really expecting writing to be an attainable occupation. Well, I didn't. It was a pipe dream. "

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

" 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? "

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

" Writing, and its theatre of operation, is better than working shifts packing frozen sausages; that's all I need to think about if I'm having difficulties. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn't able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I felt impelled to write. It felt demonic, and I wanted to improve, the way some people habitually pick up a guitar and get better at playing it and making up songs. "