Sonya Hartnett quotes:

I think there is something in my books that says these are people doing their best under difficult circumstances - sometimes they do wrong things and make mistakes, but who doesn't? And who wants to read about somebody who never does?

Yeah, reflections! The same, but different. Like twins - like blood brothers! And when you need something bad done, like punishment or revenge, you'll just ask me, and I will do it -

No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'.

I'll always struggle over saying I'm a writer, even if I won the Booker Prize.

I thought about how stupid it is, that all of us are born destined to desire somebody else, though desire brings with it such disappointment and pain. Humankind's history must be scored bloody with heartbreak. This hankering for affection is a blight upon us.

More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.

If I'm desperate, I'll read anything. But even when I can be choosy, I still have no hard-and-fast rules. I have rules about what I won't read, rather than what I will. No science fiction, no romance, no chick lit. Although even these rules can be broken.

I mostly wrote 'Thursday's Child' to explore the idea of a wild child - a creature who lived much as humans used to live, when our needs were simple and our worlds were small.

I have spent a great deal of my time defending my work against those who see it as too complicated, too old in approach, too bleak to qualify as children's literature. This has been the bane of my life.

I don't understand why one should be one thing or the other. Writing, to me, is writing is writing. It should be a flexible tool. Whatever skills I have, have to work for me; I won't be dictated by them.

Goodbye, fin,' I say. And I wish I was going with him, to some warm sheltered hideaway in the hills, wish that I, too, could lie down beside the dog, feel his unbroken heartbeat, smell the dust in his fur. There's only hours. I steel my courage.Surrender."

A small town has as many eyes as a fly

I spent three years at RMIT doing a bachelor of arts and media studies. It was a hugely formative experience. As someone who had a private Catholic school upbringing, the world suddenly became a much bigger and better place for me.

A small town is nothing but eyes and gaping maw; it pecks at its own like a flock of vicious birds.

Affection makes fools. Always, without exception, love digs a channel that's sooner or later flooded by the briny water of despair.

I would always be lonely, but no more alone.

Life is lived on the inside. What's outside doesn't matter.

I feel it in my bones that if I had a kid, I would not either continue to write or have written the book I have done. So it's just me and the dog. I've always gotten along better with animals than I have with children, anyway.

I have thought you could not give everything to your books and also to your children, so for a long time, I thought if I had a child or a family, I'd think, 'How would I support them?' because basically I would stop writing.

Watching, she had felt unusually and keenly alive, alive the way a knife is sharp, so that the humiliation she was enduring was perfect, like the paring of skin from a hard apple.

How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life~?

Every atom in me feels composed of lead. This is what dying is: a pull to the ground.

How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?

I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

I suppose that's what happens when you make other people's lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you.

I want my life to be mystifying," she declared, although she didn't know what she meant.

It is scary, sometimes, Tomas admitted. But the scary bits are what make you brave.

Let me fly, let me see things that are hidden from other eyes.

Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.

My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she'd let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don't make me go.

Nothing was easy, and sometimes she failed, and sometimes she thought that the fairy stories were right, that there must indeed be easier ways of living happily ever after; but defeat is a poor ending to any tale, so she kept trying.

She doesn't understand that doors, walls, fences, ceilings - they're helpless to keep out what determinedly desires to get in.

She had witnessed the world's most beautiful things, and allowed herself to grow old and unlovely. She had felt the heat of a leviathan's roar, and the warmth within a cat's paw. She had conversed with the wind and had wiped soldier's tears. She had made people see, she'd seen herself in the sea. Butterflies had landed on her wrists, she had planted trees. She had loved, and let love go. So she smiled.

Strange how love coexists with hate, how they render eachother mute, how the swilling of them together makes a new and softer, sympathetic thing.

There is nothing that is more beautiful than everything else in the world.

There's fire in my fingers. I burn everything I touch.

Words on the page are never prisoners of the page

You're not supposed to have iron bars around you - no one is supposed to have that. You're supposed to fall down hills and get lonely, and find your own food and get wet when it rains. That's what happens when you're alive.