Susanna Clarke
Susanna Clarke
Susanna Mary Clarkeis an English author best known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time. For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication. The novel became a best-seller...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 November 1959
everybody exactly
I always start out saying exactly what everybody looks like. I don't know why.
I had to restrain myself from buying a book on 19th-century fruit knives.
confess fanny rather spite teens
I must confess that in my teens and twenties, I loved 'Mansfield Park' rather in spite of Fanny than because of her. Like Fanny's rich, sophisticated cousins, I didn't really get her.
buy fascinated mind money quite several taken weeks
I had always been fascinated by comics, but it had taken me several weeks to make up my mind to buy 'Watchmen'; for someone on a publisher's assistant's salary, it was some quite unheard-of sum of money.
turned
In some ways, 'Mansfield Park' is 'Pride and Prejudice' turned inside out.
good landscapes places quite watching
I can write most places. I particularly like writing on trains. Being between places is quite liberating, and looking out of the window, watching a procession of landscapes and random-ish objects, is very good for stories.
led people stories
I could always imagine more interesting places to be than where I was. And more interesting people than me being there. Eventually, this led to making up stories and writing things down.
convincing magicians
In 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,' I wanted to create the most convincing story of magic and magicians that I could.
reading home men
An explorer cannot stay at home reading maps other men have made.
uncles men luck
Ha!' said the tall man drily. 'He was in high luck. Rich old uncles who die are in shockingly short supply.
brave
But, though French, she was also very brave...
wine drunk magic
Magic, madam, is like wine and, if you are not used to it, it will make you drunk.
lonely play people
Perhaps I am too tame, too domestic a magician. But how does one work up a little madness? I meet with mad people every day in the street, but I never thought before to wonder how they got mad. Perhaps I should go wandering on lonely moors and barren shores. That is always a popular place for lunatics - in novels and plays at any rate. Perhaps wild England will make me mad.
cat silence peculiar
For, though the room was silent, the silence of half a hundred cats is a peculiar thing, like fifty individual silences all piled one on top of another.