Diane Setterfield Quotes

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, 'Me next! Go on! My turn!' I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again.

Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist.

Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.

When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t 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.

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.

I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.

... [They] took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again, after death has stopped us all in its tracks.

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.

Of course I loved books more than people.

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

What better place to kill time than a library?

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.

Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.

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.

My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.

For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.

He has described in precise, measured words the beautiful desolation he feels at the close of novels where the message is that there is no end to human suffering, only endurance.