Sarah Hall Quotes

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.

I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.

I don't have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.

For me as a writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly never with a specific agenda.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

'Gone-Away World' was a shotgun blast, an explosion out of the box I'd put myself into writing film scripts. 'Tigerman' is shorter, tighter, more crafted.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.

I don't like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can't go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

I want to be a better writer. I want to learn and grow, to know how to tell stories in a different and more challenging way. I've learned it doesn't get easier each time. It actually gets harder.