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.

You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.

When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop.

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.

You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers.

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.

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.

I think you can tell any human story in a particular place.

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.

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.

Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power.

Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy.

The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared.

A lot of my literature deals with these people who are somehow magnetic because they have that ability to step over lines.

I wander around the house and write in bed, at the kitchen table, by the window, in the yard.

I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious.

I'm a home-roamer and can't do study or office scenarios.

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.

I've always been interested in the history of radical feminism - what happened to those women of the 1960s and '70s.

I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist.