Nicola Griffith Quotes & Sayings

If you have the language gift, you can use it as a tool. — Nicola Griffith

Everyone has this notion of the Middle Ages - certainly the early Middle Ages - as being this very superstitious era. I think that all eras are superstitious. We all have our magical thinking. — Nicola Griffith

I'm not sure many writers are trying to reconcile all the things that are separated in our culture - body and mind, urban and pastoral, lyricism and hardboiled, men and women, joy and grief. I tried to do quite a lot, but I wanted to create a serious work of literature. — Nicola Griffith

I'm tired of being considered a lesbian writer, tired of being a science-fiction writer, tired of being a thriller writer. I'm a writer. Period. Story matters to me. — Nicola Griffith

I want to write about grown-up things. — Nicola Griffith

There are days when I should be writing, and I am so tired that I can't. And the fatigue also affects my emotions, making me not even care about writing. There are days when I wake up so angry I can barely speak, and also days when I am so sad. — Nicola Griffith

I don't belong to anyone! I'm not a thing, to be kept or ordered or driven to such despair that I open my own veins. Look at me, Aoife. Look at me! I'm a woman. — Nicola Griffith

My first website went up in 1995. On it I ran a feature called Ask Nicola. Readers would email me questions, I'd answer whichever took my fancy. — Nicola Griffith

Setting is my primary joy as a writer, building a world and watching people respond to it. — Nicola Griffith

Wood is an endlessly adaptive material. You can plane, chisel, saw, carve, sand, and bend it, and when the pieces are the shape you want you can use dovetail joints, tenpenny nails, pegs or glue; you can use lamination or inlay or marquetry; and then you can beautify it with French polish or plain linseed oil or subtle stains. And when you go to dinner at a friend's house, the candlelight will pick out the contours of grain and line, and when you take your seat you will be reminded that what you are sitting on grew from the dirt, stretched towards the sun, weathered rain and wind, and sheltered animals; it was not extruded by faceless machines lined on a cold cement floor and fed from metal vats. Wood reminds us where we come from. — Nicola Griffith

Always know what they want to hear - not just what everyone knew they wanted to hear but what they didn't even dare name to themselves. Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted all along. — Nicola Griffith

You're like a sharp bright piece broken from a star. Too sharp, too bright, sometimes, for your own good. — Nicola Griffith

There is one thing Margaret Thatcher said that I agree with: if you have to tell people you're important, you're not. — Nicola Griffith

She liked time at the edges of things
the edge of the crowd, the edge of the pool, the edge of the wood
where all must pass but none quite belonged. — Nicola Griffith

Dogs own space and cats own time. — Nicola Griffith

Reading is the gateway to so many things that helps makes it possible for seven billion people to live together on one planet. Literature is the great extra-somatic keeper of our knowledge of what it is to be human. Reading elevates us. We read to be our best selves. — Nicola Griffith

The fact they could check becomes the prophecy they must believe. — Nicola Griffith

Hild fetched a lump of grey salt for Mildburh and mortar and pestle to crush it in. She loved the gritty crunch and thump under her hand. It sounded like a cat eating a bird. — Nicola Griffith

She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father's words, and her mother's, and her sister's. Utterly unlike Onnen's otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn't there. — Nicola Griffith

Lore, if you wait for the right moment, you'll wait forever. — Nicola Griffith

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief. — Nicola Griffith

They were connected: the world, her body, her face. Perhaps she should not be asking who she was but, rather, of what she was a part. — Nicola Griffith