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Sarah Hall [1974-0] English

Rank: 102
Writer, Novelist

Sarah Hall is an English novelist, and poet. Her critically acclaimed second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was nominated for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. She currently lives in Norwich, in eastern England.

Amazing, Birthday, Design

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.		101
My work is of me; it's not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am.		102
The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared.		103
When you are a kid, a wolf is an amazing sight, so sumptuous. I sort of knew these were splendid creatures, that I was not going to find them outside roaming around. It was like a dog, but not a dog. It was incredible, a god!	Amazing	104
I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious.		105
Our lives are politically wound.		106
You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.		107
I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off.		108
I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum.		109
I can gabble on now, but I couldn't when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time in my own head on the moors by myself. It felt like writing was the right way to express myself.		110
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.		111
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.		112
James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.		113
I'm a home-roamer and can't do study or office scenarios.		114
A lot of my literature deals with these people who are somehow magnetic because they have that ability to step over lines.		115
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.		116
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.		117
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.		118
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.		119
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.		120
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.		121
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.		122
The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.		123
I am a feminist, although I always worry saying that because you then get people asking you about the 1970s.		124
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.		125
I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist.		126
Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.		201
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.		202
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.		203
I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women.		204
I've always been interested in the history of radical feminism - what happened to those women of the 1960s and '70s.		205
I think you can tell any human story in a particular place.		206
I don't think practitioners should necessarily be advertising their work.		207
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.		208
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.		209
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.		210
Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers.		211
Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped.		212
Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required.		213
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.		214
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.		215
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.		216
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.		217
For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary.		218
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.		219
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.		220
I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.		221
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.		222
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.		223
Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power.		224
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.		225
I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.		226
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.		301
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.		302
You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.		303
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.		304
I wander around the house and write in bed, at the kitchen table, by the window, in the yard.		305
There's nothing like the vast, dark Atlantic to remind you of your mortality. But terror can also be exhilarating.		306
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.		307
Swimming in the cold and the dark of British autumn is not for the faint-hearted.		308
I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life.		309
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?		310
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.		311
When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop.		312
Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.		313
Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy.		314
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.		315
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.		316
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.	Birthday	317
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.	Design	318
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.		319

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