Quotes by Susan Hill - Page 1

Flashback in film rarely works.
Susan Hill / Author
Flashback
Rarely
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Yorkshire is so much part of me.
Susan Hill / Author
Yorkshire
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Films always make everyone else rich save the author.
Susan Hill / Author
Author
Everyone Else
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I don't really do jolly. I don't know why, I just don't.
Susan Hill / Author
Jolly
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Once you finish a book, you let it go out into the world to seek its fortune.
Susan Hill / Author
Finish
Seek
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In another life I would be a medievalist. I loved Chaucer, far more than Shakespeare.
Susan Hill / Author
Chaucer
Shakespeare
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It would be difficult to write a convincing ghost story set on a sunny day in a big city.
Susan Hill / Author
Convincing
Difficult
Ghost
Sunny
Big City
Set
Story
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I collect Victorian automata and coming across them in the dark does give you a little shudder.
Susan Hill / Author
Dark
Doe
Giving
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Without turning prison life into something more meaningful, prisoners are more likely to reoffend.
Susan Hill / Author
Meaningful
Turning
Prisoners
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I'm really quite hard to scare so it was about mining times when I have jumped, and what creeps me out.
Susan Hill / Author
Creeps
Hard
Scare
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I'm not one of those people who hates Amazon because they're big. Why pay a third more for the same thing?
Susan Hill / Author
People More Why
Hates
Same Thing
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For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.
Susan Hill / Author
Forever
Innocence
Lost
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Ghost stories ... tell us about things that lie hidden within all of us, and which lurk outside all around us.
Susan Hill / Author
Ghost Stories
Lying
Stories
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Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.
Susan Hill / Author
Reader
Anyway
Entirely
Nobody Else
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The New Testament is about loving other people as you love yourself. That means caring for them and looking after them and being kind to them.
Susan Hill / Author
Caring
Love Yourself
New Testament
Testament
Love Love Yourself Yourself
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I like going into a school matinee. I like to be behind the stage because there's a spy-hole and what you see is the best moment in all theatre.
Susan Hill / Author
School
Spy
Theatre
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I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.
Susan Hill / Author
Desks
Night
Paper
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A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.
Susan Hill / Author
Book
Inanimate Objects
New Life
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I don't understand it when people get cross about how one of their works was adapted and say, 'Oh, they ruined it!' Well, the book is still there.
Susan Hill / Author
Adapted
Ruined
People How Understand
Cross
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I was an only child who was never really good at anything else. I had no other option. I could write; I wanted to write; I wrote. Otherwise, I was unemployable.
Susan Hill / Author
Only Child
Good Anything Never
Anything Else
Option
Good Never Anything
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Though they don't always have to be set in fog, weather is incredibly important in ghost stories. As is suspense: you've got to turn the screw very, very slowly.
Susan Hill / Author
Fog
Ghost
Ghost Stories
Stories
Suspense
Weather
Slowly
Incredibly
Screw
Though
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I had not yet learned that we make our own destiny, it springs from within us. It is not the outward events but what we allow ourselves to make of them that count.
Susan Hill / Author
Destiny
Events
Spring
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Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.
Susan Hill / Author
Running
Moving
People
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I wrote ghost stories because I'd always enjoyed reading them, and they seemed to be fizzling out... I don't take them terribly seriously. It's like a cake, with ingredients.
Susan Hill / Author
Cake
Ghost
Ghost Stories
Ingredients
Terribly
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A lot of writers want everything put on screen, but it doesn't work like that. The screenwriter brings her own imaginative interpretation, just as the director and actors do.
Susan Hill / Author
Imaginative
Interpretation
Brings
Screenwriter
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The key word for my book The Woman in Black is unsettling... because you're not terrified all of the time or even frightened, but you're unsettled and once you're unsettled, then the door's open.
Susan Hill / Author
Book
Doors
Keys
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If you were writing a short ghost story, I would say start very quietly and go, 'One, two, three jump.' Or start with a jump and make it jumpier. But with a long story, it must have rises and falls.
Susan Hill / Author
Ghost
Long Story
Falls
Jump
Quietly
Rises
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It's just occurred to me that some horror films everybody laughs because they're so ridiculous and they're so frightening in a way, the filmmakers' are trying everything, that they just end up being funny.
Susan Hill / Author
Laughing
Trying Everything
Way
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It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it.
Susan Hill / Author
Christmas
Length
Pages
Short Story
Carol
Frighten
Screw
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I have only read very classic traditional English ghost stories, other than Henry James, who wrote some magnificent short ones as well as the longer 'Turn of the Screw.' He, Dickens, and M.R. James are my influences.
Susan Hill / Author
Classic
Dickens
Ghost
Ghost Stories
Magnificent
Traditional
Influences
James
Screw
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Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not 'real'. No. But what was 'real'? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.
Susan Hill / Author
Doors
Doubt
Real
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This gardener will be out in the very early morning and from late afternoon, attentive to small changes in the quality of light and the atmosphere, as well as to every nuance of the season, which combine to create perfection.
Susan Hill / Author
Morning
Light
Small Changes
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Gardeners celebrate the influence of time. If we have had a late cold spring followed by a desiccating drought, autumn may be the most soft and golden for years; one poor season will sooner or later be compensated for by another.
Susan Hill / Author
Time
Autumn
Spring
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The one thing the Victorians really believed in was philanthropy. I think we've forgotten the obligation to be philanthropic. I think we need smaller government, but I want to make it clear I'm not the Sarah Palin of the Cotswolds.
Susan Hill / Author
Forgotten
Obligation
Palin
Philanthropic
Smaller Government
Sarah Palin
Sarah
Smaller
The One Thing
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I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.
Susan Hill / Author
Hiding
Poet
Prose
Relate
Short Story
Waste
Written
Seen
Counts
Either
Short
Word
Nearest
Story
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Of all human activities, apart from the procreation of children, gardening is the most optimistic and hopeful. The gardener is by definition one who plans for and believes and trusts in a future, whether in the short or the longer term.
Susan Hill / Author
Optimistic
Believe
Children
Hopeful
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My head reeled at the sheer and startling beauty, the wide, bare openness of it. The sense of space, the vastness of the sky above and on either side made my heart race, I would have travelled a thousand miles to see this. I had never imagined such a place.
Susan Hill / Author
Heart
Race
Sky
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Love has an enormous number of connotations, and if somebody is a person who does kind acts as a way of life, if they are generally disposed to being caring and loving and doing things for other people, then kindness is a much stronger word than we make it out to be.
Susan Hill / Author
Caring
Enormous
Stronger
Acts
Connotations
Generally
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Theology is endlessly interesting in that you can study it without believing in anything. I do believe, but you don't have to. I got very caught up in the 11th-century monasticism and the Cistercians. My dissertation was about Aelred of Rievaulx and one of his books.
Susan Hill / Author
Caught
Dissertation
Theology
Believing
Endlessly
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I read a lot of ghost stories because I was writing a ghost story. I didn't think at all I was writing a horror or a thriller or whatever because it is about a ghost, whereas a horror film can be about aliens or things that rise out of the marsh that have no human shape.
Susan Hill / Author
Ghost Stories
Thinking
Writing
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There is a continuity about the garden and an order of succession in the garden year which is deeply pleasing, and in one sense there are no breaks or divisions - seed time flows on to flowering time and harvest time; no sooner is one thing dying than another is coming to life.
Susan Hill / Author
Life
Time
Garden
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I was taught to whistle as a little girl by an undertaker. I used to sit in his workshop, watching him planing wood for the coffins, and he used to whistle all the time - and eventually I started whistling, too. I can whistle anything, particularly trumpet tunes from Classic FM.
Susan Hill / Author
Classic
Undertaker
Whistling
Whistle
Trumpet
Little Girl
Wood
Workshop
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A man may be accused of cowardice for fleeing away from all manner of physical dangers but when things supernatural, insubstantial and inexplicable threaten not only his safety and well-being but his sanity, his innermost soul, then retreat is not a sign of weakness but the most prudent course.
Susan Hill / Author
Men
Safety
Soul
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Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.
Susan Hill / Author
Book
Cutting
Unique
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Certainly with a book, people are going to be able to read it and give themselves permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified because they're in a safe place while they're reading. That's what you can rely on as a writer, that people can let themselves be really frightened because they're really all right.
Susan Hill / Author
Book
Delicious
Frightened
Permission
Reading
Rely
Safe
Terrified
Writer
Certainly
Safe Place
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The more contemplative gardener, seeing the garden as a whole, the design of it, and its nature as a still place of delight and refreshment, will wait and hope for the moment when it seems to achieve perfection. Awareness of when such moments are most likely helps to make them happen; they will not be entirely accidental but anticipated; everything will be planned to encourage them.
Susan Hill / Author
Garden
Perfection
Waiting
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Certainly with a book, people are going to be able to read it and give themselves permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified because they're in a safe place while they're reading. That's what you can rely on as a writer, that people can let themselves be really frightened because they're really all right. Being frightened when you're not sure you're all right is a big difference.
Susan Hill / Author
Book
Differences
Reading
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I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure.
Susan Hill / Author
Book
Hands
Simple
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Susan Hill Quotes - Page 1

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