Susan Hill Quotes

“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. Alice in Wonderland. the Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W H Auden. The Tale of Mr Tod. Howard's End. What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books as me. So 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

“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

“For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.”

— Susan Hill

“They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.”

— Susan Hill

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

Memory is like a long, dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. And then one plunges into the dark stretch again.

— Susan Hill

“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

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

“I had always known in my heart that the experience would never leave me, that it was now woven into my very fibers, an inextricable part of my past, but I had hoped never to have to recollect it, consciously, and in full, ever again. Like an old wound, it gave off a faint twinge now and again, but less and less often, less and less painfully, as the years went on and my happiness, sanity and equilibrium were assured. Of late, it had been like the outermost ripple on a pool, merely the faint memory of a memory.”

— Susan Hill

“For a long time, I did not move from the dark, wood-panelled hall. I wanted company, and I had none, lights and warmth and a strong drink inside me, I needed reassurance. But, more than anything else, I needed an explanation. It is remarkable how powerful a force simple curiosity can be. I had never realized that before now. In spite of my intense fear and sense of shock, I was consumed with the desire to find out exactly who it was that I had seen, and how, I could not rest until I had settled the business, for all that, while out there, I had not dared to stay and make any investigations.”

— Susan Hill

“I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless.”

— Susan Hill

“No, no, you have none of you any idea. This is all nonsense, fantasy, it is not like this. Nothing so blood-curdling and becreepered and crude - not so ... so laughable. The truth is quite other, and altogether more terrible.”

— Susan Hill

“The lamps were lit, and a good fire crackled in the great stone fireplace. There was a discreet chink of china, the brightness of silver teapot and muffin cover, the comforting smell mingled of steaming hot water, toast and a little sweet tobacco.”

— Susan Hill

“It was true that the ghastly sounds I had heard through the fog had greatly upset me but far worse was what emanated from and surrounded these things and arose to unsteady me, an atmosphere, a force - I do not exactly know what to call it - of evil and uncleanness, of terror and suffering, of malevolence and bitter anger”

— Susan Hill

“We have a friend, and Anglophile American city-dweller in his eighties, whose main ambition, now, is to hear a cuckoo call, for he never has, and perhaps he never will, for he is rather deaf. But, if he came and sat under the magic apple tree for an afternoon in May, it would be quiet enough, and then he might listen to the cuckoo-cuckoo-cuckoo until he had his fill.”

— Susan Hill

“Deep under the earth, inside its cardboard coffin, shrouded in the layers of white paper, the china doll with the jagged open crevasse in its skull was crying.”

— Susan Hill

“Eucalyptus. Murray Bail. Someone told me that this was a great novel so I bought it, but then I discovered that it was great Australian novel so I put it away. I find it difficult to get to grips with Australian novels. Difficult, but not impossible.”

— Susan Hill

“It is okay to climb as long as you are not afraid, because being afraid is what made you fall”

— Susan Hill

Small children will talk to anyone, once the guard of shyness has fallen, and they have, like the elderly, a sense of immediacy, a need to say or do something, now, now, the minute it is thought of, combined with that other sense, of the complete irrelevance of time.

— Susan Hill

By the next war, the message will have got through.
There will never be another war.
There will always be wars.
Men couldn't be so stupid, John! After all this? Isn't the only real purpose of our being here to teach them that lesson - how bloody useless and pointless the whole thing is?
Men are naturally stupid and they do not learn from experience.

— Susan Hill

“It would be difficult to write a convincing ghost story set on a sunny day in a big city.”

— Susan Hill

“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

“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

“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

I don't really do jolly. I don't know why, I just don't.

— Susan Hill

“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

“In another life I would be a medievalist. I loved Chaucer, far more than Shakespeare.”

— Susan Hill

“Once you finish a book, you let it go out into the world to seek its fortune.”

— Susan Hill

“Without turning prison life into something more meaningful, prisoners are more likely to reoffend.”

— Susan Hill

“Yorkshire is so much part of me.”

— Susan Hill

“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

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

I'm really quite hard to scare so it was about mining times when I have jumped, and what creeps me out.

— Susan Hill

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Ghost stories ... tell us about things that lie hidden within all of us, and which lurk outside all around us.”

— Susan Hill

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