Quotes by Diane Setterfield

In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.

How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairy tales appropriated by a mind hungry for a story. The fantasies of an imaginative little girl anxious to explain to herself the inexplicable. Whatever story I may have discovered on the frontier of forgetting, I do not pretend to myself that is the truth.

I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the begging from the shape of later events. - Vida Winter

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, dont expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.

No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

Politeness. Now theres a poor mans virtue if ever there was one. Whats so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, its easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is whats left when youve failed at everything else. People with ambition dont give a damn what other people think about them.

People with ambition dont give a damn what other people think of them.

...but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.

No one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night.

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

You leave the previous book with ideas and themes - characters even - caught in the fibers of your clothing - and when you open a new book, they are still with you.

You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but its really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.

“All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.”

“Ive nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.”