Susanna Clarke Quotes

For me, when I 'discover' a story, there is a feeling of buoyancy and clarity, perhaps similar to early morning out on a prairie highway, when darkness lifts and reveals the outline of farmhouses and copses of trees in the distance.

I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life.

I think the most rewarding part for me is kind of not knowing where the story's going next, and then finding out and being blown away by it.

I like to be fulfilled in telling stories and in creating, but I'm just a curious person.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

It's true to say that once I've got the bare bones of a story, I often get ideas from my own research trips to faraway places.

There are a few really fantastic stories left, and that kind of gives you some inspiration to find even new ones.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

I am always worried that over-planning and outlining will kill the magic of writing; most of the world I created in 'California' occurred via good old sexy sentence-making.

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.

I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

Nothing much interested me other than playing with language and telling stories and doing something with the wonders of the world around me.

I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

I was born to travel and write verse.

When I read good stories, I want to write good stories too.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

Every day I fantasise about situations and little themes I see in front of me that would make a good beginning of a story. But one has to be disciplined and just sit down and do it.

I find that it's really important for me to imagine characters and situations. That allows me a lot of freedom.

The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.

He brought imagination to the story of the Creation.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.