180 Quotes by Sarah Waters

My nan was a nursery maid. Most people weren't in big houses. They were maids of all work.

My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.

When theatre works, it's like nothing else, and when it doesn't, which is often, it's excruciating. It's perhaps not so excruciating when a novel goes wrong, but there is a kind of magic that can and should happen.

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.

Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy to go on rewriting 'Tipping the Velvet' forever because it was so much fun.

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 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.

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.