Quotes by Diane Setterfield

About Diane Setterfield:

Diane Setterfield is a British author whose 2006 debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, became a New York Times No. 1 best-seller. It is written in the Gothic tradition, with echoes of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Her debut novel was turned into a television film.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a...

Diane Setterfield

I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the movements of quills as they write love letters, wills and confessions. I...

Diane Setterfield

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 co...

Diane Setterfield

My mother says that after I first visited the home of the man I later married, she knew it was serious when I told her, 'Mum, he has more books than me!' So, books are at the very heart of my life.

Diane Setterfield

I am always happy up a ladder with a paintbrush in my hand. And I wish I had more time to spend in the garden - not least because I get good ideas for writing when I'm out there.

Diane Setterfield

For several decades, I believed it was necessary to be extraordinary if you wanted to write, and since I wasn't, I gave up my ambition and settled down to a life of reading.

Diane Setterfield

I see people as haunted by the selves they don't know... I don't have children, but I have nieces and nephews, and one thing I notice is how fascinated they are by stories of their lives before they can remember.

Diane Setterfield

I have kept a reading diary since I was 18. I am jealous of my friend who has kept hers since she was ten.

Diane Setterfield

The addictive pleasure of abandoning yourself to a book, of losing consciousness of your worries, your body, and your surroundings, to become a ghost haunting other worlds has influenced me in many ways.

Diane Setterfield

We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives.

Diane Setterfield

My liking for Scandinavian crime fiction led me into exploring literary writers from the same countries.

Diane Setterfield

People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.

Diane Setterfield

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

Diane Setterfield

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.

Diane Setterfield

But pecuniary interest is clearly not in your nature. How quaint. I have written about people who don't care for money, but I never expected to meet one. Therefor I conclude that the difficulty concerns integrity. People whose lives are not balanced ...

Diane Setterfield

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

Diane Setterfield

There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someon...

Diane Setterfield

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

Diane Setterfield

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.

Diane Setterfield

The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone ...

Diane Setterfield

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

Diane Setterfield

Author Bio

  • NameDiane Setterfield
  • DescriptionEnglish novelist
  • BornAugust 22, 1964
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWoman Of Letters