Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was disinclined to have the status of a writer.
I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people.
I tend to process emotional stuff very, very slowly.
All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve.
Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them.
History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.
I am a fallen woman, but I assure you: I did not fall. I was pushed.
Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.
On an average day, I spend 12 hours listening to music. Very little writing.
Reassurance is such a sad, mad thing. Deep inside, everyone knows the truth.
You want Paradise, you gotta build it on war, on blood, on envy and naked greed.
Most distracting of all, though, was not the threat of danger but the allure of beauty.
Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.
Art is head space that is very exclusive: it shuts people out; other people cease to exist.
I get increasingly respectful of people who have faith and increasingly creeped out by them.
Nowadays, her life is more like a newspaper: aimless, up-to-date and full of meaningless events
In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.
I had been attempting novels since I was 14 but always ran out of steam. High hopes, poor craftsmanship.
Most true things are kind of corny, don’t you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.
'A Christmas Carol' is an extravagantly symbolic thing - as rich in symbols as Christmas pudding is rich in raisins.
The world changes too fast. You take your eyes off something that's always been there, and the next minute it's just a memory.
For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums.
When we ask bureaucrats to identify who is responsible for fixing anything, they reassure us that there are 'procedures in place.'
A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.
I'm still tremendously proud of 'Crimson Petal.' I'm still very emotionally involved with these characters. I still care about them.
In all of my work, I think I'm exploring the idea that we are aliens to each other, how there is a huge distance that separates us all.
Pathos and poignancy are, to me, tactics and techniques; in my work as a writer, I fetch them from my toolbox and use them as required.
One of the things my success as an author has forced me to face is how dysfunctional... Maybe that's a strong word, but how obsessive I am.
If someone's a cartoon villain, you can dismiss them, but if they behave despicably but you kind of like them, they really get under your skin.
When the person you love has cancer, they are, in a sense, living on Planet Cancer. They are in a place where you are not. And you can't follow them.
My energies get used up quite quickly, and the psychic space I'm in when I write is a very lonely one, so I found that harder and harder to get back to.
The privileged Victorians who did most to improve the lives of the poor were not ashamed of their pious intent: they were superiors seeking to help inferiors.
'The Crimson Petal and the White' is a book, and it will win or lose the trust of each reader when they begin reading its pages. That relationship will go on.
History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That's very likely to happen to my books, and if I'm extremely lucky, maybe one of my books will survive.
Most books are surplus to the world's requirements, and I am going to sound very conceited here, but I am trying to write books that aren't just using up trees.
So many books that have Christian characters but are written by atheists mercilessly pillory and mock and question the motives of people with faith. I'm past all that.
I joined an Internet community of Victorian scholars, which meant that if I posted a question about 1875's lavender harvest, more than a thousand experts would ponder it.
Very few stories embody a human truth so definitively that we cannot think of the truth without remembering the story and cannot imagine how people ever got by without it.
Modern politicians like Cameron dream of exerting paternal influence without being seen as paternalistic, of fostering moral behaviour without being considered moralistic.
When answering questions over the years about film and TV adaptations of my books, I have always maintained that no movie or TV series could ever change or damage my work.
The mere fact of my novel being filmed means very little to me. For a long while after 'The Crimson Petal's publication in 2002, it looked as though Hollywood was going to adapt it.
A text may be superbly written, exquisitely subtle, deeply meaningful, but still seem like a luxury extra, something we add to the already well-stocked store of our reading experience.
I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it whatsoever.
I don't remember my childhood very well for one reason or another, possibly childhood trauma or possibly just a very bad memory. My early life has sort of been erased from my memory banks.
The family I grew up in was very inflexible and harsh. It left me with the feeling that if you do let somebody down badly, then even if they tell you it's all right, it cannot be all right.
I wanted each of my books to be very different from the others, each to be special and uncategorizable, and I knew I could only do that a few times before I was in danger of repeating myself.
Before I was published, I thought men read car manuals or books about football. But once I started having really serious conversations with male lovers of literature, I let go of that prejudice.
I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
I would love to have faith. When you take God out of the universe, there is no-one taking care us - we are just parcels of meat, collections of atoms - we have a little flowering on Earth, and then we're gone.
At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.