Susan Hill Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I collect Victorian automata and coming across them in the dark does give you a little shudder.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Flashback in film rarely works.

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.

Yorkshire is so much part of me.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I’m not one of those people who hates Amazon because they’re big. Why pay a third more for the same thing?

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.

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.

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.