Susanna Clarke (Susanna Mary Clarke) Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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The first thing my writing ever earned me wasn't an advance on a book; it wasn't a fee for an article or anything like that. It was, in fact, a residency at Hedgebrook Farm.
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Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.
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Nothing endures but personal qualities.
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Writing a tribe is fun. They have their own language, their own slang; they repeat it, and it becomes part of the texture of the play. For a writer, that's thrilling. That's when my pen flies.
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I read my books to writing workshops and friends, and I'm often focussed just on keeping them entertained. I never think about marketing at all.
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All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.
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Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.
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I was very, very little - it was the first time I ever cooked on my own, with my mother's supervision - and I made scrambled eggs. I felt so accomplished, like magic!
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I love writing. Given a choice, after directing for all these years, and if given an army of talented directors, I would not direct at all.
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The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.
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Arendt did have a certain snobbishness, though in some of her writing she expressed more democratic attitudes.
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For me, writing is such an escape, and I felt very lucky to have this to run away to.
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The nice thing about writing at home is that it's almost as though I'm doing it already. I get out of bed thinking of my work, and I don't have to go anywhere to do it.
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I spent a lot of time doing really unimportant work as an actor. It was important when I started writing that I obviously make it entertaining, or no one is going to go see it - but to really make you think, that is my goal.
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I think making the referee aware of a situation, there is nothing wrong with that.
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But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.
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If I let myself go, nothing will get done.
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Storytelling is storytelling. Good stories need compelling characters and interesting conflicts. That's the bottom line no matter what medium you're writing for.
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I have been writing fairy tales for as long as I can remember. Not much has changed in terms of my natural attraction to the narrative techniques of fairy tales. My appreciation of them in the traditional stories has deepened, especially of flat and unadorned language, intuitive logic, abstraction, and everyday magic.
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The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet.
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It's important to put all I have into my career.
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You can call me a cheater and doper until the cows come home. But the fact remains that in a race where everybody had equal opportunity, I played the game, and I played it well.
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My skin may have wrinkles but it's because I'm smiling so much. That might sound like some terrible American greetings card, but I feel it's immoral for me to castigate my body for getting older, when it does everything I ask of it.
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A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.
