Sara Sheridan Quotes

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

I believe that being able to communicate directly with readers is a boon. I certainly enjoy it as much as they do.

Most people do a good deal of whatever they do motivated by love. For me, few stories are truly complete without it.

In the industry, trying out new genres is not always encouraged but what I've discovered is that as a writer, a jaunt outside my comfort zone generally brings new skills to the main body of my work.

For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it.

It's part of a writer's job to be nosy about everything.

I love writing, and just as much, I love undertaking research.

The space where I write is in my head, I suppose.

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

Being a writer is a more difficult job than people imagine.

I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.

Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist.

I'm a professional writer and I consider it part of my job to publicise my work and these days part of that job is done online.

As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective.

Today is the anniversary of my husband’s death, " Maria announced. It was a dramatic statement, but the occasion seemed to demand it. "And I am going to leave.

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

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.

An eerie atmosphere leeched from the soot-damaged walls. It was as if the house had died, and yet she felt she belonged here. It was as if the old place wanted to claim her from the grave.

A chap’s impending death has a way of focusing the mind.

New technologies and resources offer exciting opportunities. They democratise access to information.

Sometimes a person’s first assumption was very telling. It revealed how they perceived the situation.

People see what they expect to see.

The law don’t like jazz clubs. No one wants anything to do with that kind of trouble.

One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real.

The hard fact is that writing is available to readers because of market factors as much as particular writing talent.

This is the cusp of an age at least as exciting and as brimful of potential as the early days of the printing press.

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.

History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie.

Cases fired by emotion rather than money were dangerous.

People who inspire such contradictory emotions must be worthwhile, I reasoned.

Parisians were not easy to engage in conversation. Perhaps that was why the Resistance had been so successful.

Mrs Beaumont shrugged. ‘Dougie travelled light in life, ’ she said. ‘He knew it was people who were important.

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

I have a very strong sense that we only know where we are by looking clearly at where we've come from.

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

Once they have dedicated themselves to a cause, women will fight to the end for it.

No one's book is perfect.

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.

The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.

Having instant feedback on twitter to research material I'm considering is an enormous help.

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

Once you’re on the pleasure express, it’s hard to get off and switch to another, slower service.

Muscat is like a mind-altering drug. A stroll in its streets is like getting drunk for the first time

The devil was always in the detail. And here the detail was certainly devilish.

There was something about Maria Graham that you could believe in – a slice of home. If not unique in her travelling, she was at least extraordinary.

Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content.

Britain wouldn’t have won the war without its eccentric geniuses.

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.

She tried to focus on the element of riddle or at least puzzle contained in the letter and ignore the sense of doom that was sweeping through her like clouds rolling to the shore over open water.

The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial.