45 Quotes by Samantha Harvey

To write fiction you have to engage in organised fraud, the laundering of experience into the offshore haven of words.

The night is itself without narrative – the way the hours move, less like a stream flowing somewhere and more like water swilling in a shallow pool, until suddenly the pool is drained and it’s morning.

Time is the thing that breaks apart life from death, eases apart their embrace. Time, not life, is what we live. Time, not life, is what runs out. Time pushes death over there, where we can see it, and then offers itself as finite protection.

If the mind is a cacophony, the subconscious is silent theatre.

The mind is a prison. And when we write the noise is distilled and alchemised, and the self can find a way out, which I think is what love is – the escape of the self from the self.

She paused; her speech was ever thus. Spirals of deepening particulars, then pauses when she saw she'd strayed from the point.

You need to believe that you can sleep again.’‘Since when was sleep a matter of faith?

What an unlikely wonder is life, that it holds in itself the whole wildness of death – those bacteria didn’t come into life at the point of death, they were always there and they always wanted to eat you, and your cells always contained in them the enzymes that would assist your rotting. It was only ever your vehemence to survive that prevented all that. Did you know, were you ever able to detect within, the passionate warfare that kept you here?

Writing is lucid dreaming – the work of the subconscious that has a toe in the conscious, just enough to harness the dream’s waywardness. I always heard it said that writing draws on the subconscious, but that isn’t true. It is the subconscious, and it draws on the conscious.