Sarah Waters Quotes

I wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.

Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether it’s terrorism or global financial meltdown or climate change – huge things that affect us deeply, and yet things about which we can do, individually, very little.

I love research. Sometimes I think writing novels is just an excuse to allow myself this leisurely time of getting to know a period and reading its books and watching its films. I see it as a real treat.

I love film and, particularly, shorts. You don’t get to see them often, and they’re a great little form, like a short story.

Sometimes I think I’d be perfectly happy to go on rewriting ‘Tipping the Velvet‘ forever because it was so much fun.

I do love the past but wouldn’t want to live in it.

I used to hate flying. I would sit there, rigid, convinced that if I relaxed, the plane would drop out of the sky.

My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence.

I knew I’d always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, ‘Well, I’d rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one’.

I never expected my books to do even as well as they have. I still feel grateful for it, every single day.

People say, ‘You’re like Dickens‘, but I’m not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she‘s writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.

I’ve never managed to get very far with Henry James.

When theatre works, it’s like nothing else, and when it doesn’t, which is often, it’s excruciating. It’s perhaps not so excruciating when a novel goes wrong, but there is a kind of magic that can and should happen.

All I can do is write about whatever grabs me.

I was mad about the theatre growing up, really mad. We had a local theatre, the Torch, and I used to usher there. I would see the shows over and over again.

My nan was a nursery maid. Most people weren’t in big houses. They were maids of all work.

It was a great childhood. We weren’t especially wealthy or anything, but I felt I had a kind of safety and freedom.

The relationship you have with your mother is like nothing else. They do kind of know everything about you, even though they don’t confront it. That is often a dynamic from childhood onwards. As a teenager, you want to be independent and do slightly furtive things.

Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn’t happen with a play. Even performances are different every night.