“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“I wander around the house and write in bed, at the kitchen table, by the window, in the yard.”
― Sarah Hall
“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!”
― Sarah Hall
“Swimming in the cold and the dark of British autumn is not for the faint-hearted.”
― Sarah Hall
“I don’t see that books can be written without political context – not if they’re relevant and ambitious.”
― Sarah Hall
“Our lives are politically wound.”
― Sarah Hall
“You can’t see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.”
― Sarah Hall
“I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off.”
― Sarah Hall
“I write in the mornings or afternoons – I’m not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.”
― Sarah Hall
“I’m a home-roamer and can’t do study or office scenarios.”
― Sarah Hall
“A lot of my literature deals with these people who are somehow magnetic because they have that ability to step over lines.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.”
― Sarah Hall
“I am a feminist, although I always worry saying that because you then get people asking you about the 1970s.”
― Sarah Hall
“My work is of me; it’s not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist.”
― Sarah Hall
“Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women.”
― Sarah Hall
“I’ve always been interested in the history of radical feminism – what happened to those women of the 1960s and ’70s.”
― Sarah Hall
“I think you can tell any human story in a particular place.”
― Sarah Hall
“I don’t think practitioners should necessarily be advertising their work.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“Having judged a few competitions, it’s clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there’s at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“I was a terrible painter – my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso’s demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“You always hope you’ll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“There’s nothing like the vast, dark Atlantic to remind you of your mortality. But terror can also be exhilarating.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life.”
― Sarah Hall
“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?”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop.”
― Sarah Hall
“Dystopian novels, such as Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.”
― Sarah Hall
“Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
“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.”
― Sarah Hall
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