Sara Sheridan Quotes

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

We are home to each other now.

The good thing about the aristocracy – German or English – was that they were easily traced, Mirabelle thought.

Books exist for me not as physical entities with pages and binding, but in the province of my mind.

When a chap is passionate, the readership can sense it.

When you fake emotion for a living, when you make your money providing fantasies for other people, tuning into their worlds and indulging them, you don’t invite someone into your world very easily.

Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!

It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes.

The financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.

Parts of my 20s and 30s have gone by in a flash but my childhood is with me all the time.

I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.

If peace came it would have to do so when there had been time to allow the hatred to grow out of people’s thinking.

I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.

I didn't expect to love being online as much as I do. I've met some wonderful people and discovered that however arcane some of my interests that there are people out there who are interested too.

It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one’s judgement.

For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.

He finds himself bored by the shenanigans of highly spirited young men. Their concerns reside somewhere between balder and dash.

Everyone was important during the war. Everyone. We worked together and we won.

People see what they expect to see.

Kindness was too painful. It had been a long time since he had had to endure it.

Edinburgh is alive with words.

I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.

Writers are, as a profession, nothing if not eccentric.

If there’s one shade a woman of colour can’t wear it’s got to be the one everyone expects, hasn’t it?

Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think.

We can learn so much looking outside our core field of expertise.

I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.

I'm very aware we are the first generation ever to have such incredible opportunities to express ourselves publicly to a worldwide audience.

Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify.

It’s not until you’re older that you realise how important the things that happened to you when you were a kid are. Even things you only half remember.

The curve of my waist in a tight fitting summer dress can really make me new friends.

I knew that I was talented. I was positive about that. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was talented at, but I was ambitious enough to wait it out and see what turned up.

The smell of tobacco usually reminded Mirabelle of being a child – coming downstairs in the morning when the dinner party her parents had hosted the night before was cleared away, but the scent of cigars still lingered.

Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

I didn’t want to give up my job and join the ranks of the Doing Fuck All brigade no matter how much money I had in the bank.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.

She picked up the stout and took a sip. It slid down her throat like silk.

It’s ridiculous – a girl steps out, goes dancing, gets her hair cut, decides to spend the summer in Italy and it’s a scandal. A chap does it and no one bats an eyelid.

It occurred to me that as a man I could do anything, everything I wanted.

Lately Mirabelle had reflected wistfully if people even noticed her – a smartly dressed woman who came and went along the Promenade, always alone.

Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds.

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.

She was herself in their company but a very specific version of herself.

She enjoyed the sights and sounds of the dockside – ports were places of freedom.

A paucity of material can open up just as many possibilities.

Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.

The smog curled between the streetlamps and the spokes of the wrought iron framework. It seemed through your body and into your bones.

We might give her presents, tell some tales, but would she ever be able to really understand what the journey had been like for us?

Vesta was so good with paperwork – you could hand her a file of drab, seemingly dull information and she’d construct a story from it worthy of a novel.

I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn.

He’s more a shape in a drape than a hep cat