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.”

“Excessively narrow reading is unhelpful, certainly. Reading only Serious Literature is no better than reading only trash in this respect.”

“Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to...”

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

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

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