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Diane Setterfield Quotes

Diane Setterfield is a British author whose 2006 debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, became a New York Times No. 1 best-seller. It is written in the Gothic tradition, with echoes of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Her debut novel was turned into a television film.

Before writing, Setterfield studied French Literature at The University of Bristol. Setterfield's PhD is on autobiographical structures in André Gide's early fiction. Setterfield taught at numerous schools as well as privately before leaving academia in the late 1990s. The Thirteenth Tale has been acquired by David Heyman at Heyday Films. It has been adapted for television by Christopher Hampton. It was shown on BBC2 in December 2013 and stars Vanessa Redgrave and Olivia Colman. Diane Setterfield's new novel, Bellman & Black, was published in the autumn of 2013 by Emily Bestler Books/Atria in the United States and by Orion in the UK. Diane Setterfield currently lives in Oxford, England.



✵ 22. August 1964

Works

The Thirteenth Tale
The Thirteenth Tale
Diane Setterfield
The Thirteenth Tale
The Thirteenth Tale
Diane Setterfield
Diane Setterfield: 42 quotes0 likes

Famous Diane Setterfield Quotes

“One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Tragedy alters everything.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“For it must be very lonely being dead.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Diane Setterfield Quotes about books

“There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. Do not abandon me.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Of course I loved books more than people.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Diane Setterfield Quotes about reading

“I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.”

Diane Setterfield

“Reading can be dangerous.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Diane Setterfield Quotes

“What better place to kill time than a library?”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Writing is more about discovery than invention.”

Diane Setterfield

“One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

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

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“To anyone who took the trouble to look, I was plainly visible, but when people are expecting to see nothing, that is usually what they see.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Life is compost.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all.
I know, he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

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