I felt impelled to write. It felt demonic, and I wanted to improve, the way some people habitually pick up a guitar and get better at playing it and making up songs. – Sarah Hall
It’s a lovely feeling, just working away at the desk, putting words down, building words up… I think you have to be aware that what you’re doing is not just a private act, it’s a societal thing. – Sarah Hall
There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy. – Sarah Hall
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. – Sarah Hall
In my early 20s, connecting with fiction was a difficult process. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to what was meaningful, what convinced, and what made sense. – Sarah Hall
One of the things I try to do with my writing is try to evoke the spirit of the place. I think these things imprint on the landscape and the culture. – Sarah Hall
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. – Sarah Hall
I have ideas. I hear voices. Words accumulate. It’s still an overriding impulse. And I’m self-employed, which means I have to be sensible and motivated about paying the bills. – Sarah Hall
Quite a lot is required of writers these days in terms of, if not promoting the work, then being a representative of the work. It’s a difficult thing, really. – Sarah Hall
I was a terrible painter – my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso’s demoiselles and the BBC test card clown. – Sarah Hall
Having judged a few competitions, it’s clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers. – Sarah Hall
I was brought up in the north of England, which is probably no rougher than anywhere else, but I remember as a child being kind of mesmerized by girls fighting on the playground. – Sarah Hall
Over the years, I’ve lived in a variety of places, including America, but I was born and raised in the Lake District, in Cumbria. Growing up in that rural, sodden, mountainous county has shaped my brain, perhaps even my temperament. – Sarah Hall
I’ve always been interested in the history of radical feminism – what happened to those women of the 1960s and ’70s. – Sarah Hall
I married an American. He was from the Pacific Northwest but went to law school in the South, so I was living in Virginia and North Carolina. – Sarah Hall
I write in the mornings or afternoons – I’m not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum. – Sarah Hall
My writing is called exotic or avant-garde because I write about rural places. Has it really come to this, that if you write about the country you are avant-garde? How did this happen? Modern agriculture and spaces are still so relevant. – Sarah Hall
I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off. – Sarah Hall
I am a feminist, although I always worry saying that because you then get people asking you about the 1970s. – Sarah Hall
