Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters
Sarah Watersis a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith...
NationalityWelsh
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 July 1966
lying kissing mouths
I knew that I couldn't lie beside her, without wanting to touch her. I couldn't have felt her breath come upon my mouth, without wanting to kiss her. And I couldn't have kissed her, without wanting to save her.
stories
I'm interested in stories that aren't getting told: it's where my interests lie.
novelist
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'.
dramas overlap plot relatively sort
I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing.
allow books excuse love novels period time watching
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.
great love
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.
fonder paying
I've ended up feeling fonder of 'The Paying Guests' than of any of my other novels.
felt freedom great wealthy
It was a great childhood. We weren't especially wealthy or anything, but I felt I had a kind of safety and freedom.
home occur
I used to write at home, but it didn't ever occur to me to be a writer.
I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.
happen novels pages point sealed within
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.
perfectly rewriting
Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy to go on rewriting 'Tipping the Velvet' forever because it was so much fun.
affect change climate dangerous feels global huge large meltdown ours unsettled whether
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.
people smith society
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.