Sara Sheridan Quotes

People are so different in wartime. No one gets to be ordinary. Not really.

I pride myself on making my own decisions, sir," she said. "I do not welcome gentlemen making them for me.

While I'm frustrated at the amount I'm expected to take on in the present, the 1950s woman was frustrated by being excluded - not being allowed to take things on at all.

In the 1950s at least less was expected of women. Now we're supposed to build a career, build a home, be the supermum that every child deserves, the perfect wife, meet the demands of elderly parents, and still stay sane.

I hope that, whatever happens within the publishing industry, because of the increased control writers have of their own careers, better sales information and the advent of the internet, that ultimately this change in our working environment will be a change for the better.

If we don't value the people who inspire us (and money is one mark of that) then what kind of culture are we building?

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

It may take a village to raise a baby, but hell! it takes an army to produce a book.

I'm proud of the culture I come from - we're a small country and a close-knit community.

I realized early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job. Because there are no pay grades and very little structure, people make interesting assumptions about the profession.

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

Those who have not been stung will hardly fear a bee the same as those who have.

We're all so digital, but the '50s was the era of watches you had to wind. When Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Everest in 1953, Hillary was equipped with a Rolex Oyster Perpetual.

Google maps are one thing but there's no substitute for pounding the beat and I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to break into the back of the houses on Belgrave Place. Once I even for followed by a suspicious householder - I'd been hanging around staring at the exterior of his flat for too long.

I find it inspiring to actively choose which traditions to celebrate and also come up with new ideas for traditions of my own.

Musicians are the worst – they're charming if you're lucky but they ain't steady.

The sky was a sparkling succession of black diamonds on black velvet made crystal clear by the blackout.

I am torn between the freedom of this adventure and the benefits of civilization despite its constraints.

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.

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

The world loves the 1950s.

Sometimes you don't even have to have sex at all, and for that kind of sicko, you charge double.

Writers need each other.

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.

Kissing her is like drinking salted water, he thinks. His thirst only increases.

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

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

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

Only a man with nothing to hide could make that kind of racket.

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

Readers are so much more important than well, just about everything.

To me, reading through old letters and journals is like treasure hunting. Somewhere in those faded, handwritten lines there is a story that has been packed away in a dusty old box for years.

Scottish writers are particularly successful in the crime genre.

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.

As a historical novelist, there is very little I like more than spending time sorting through boxes of old letters, diaries, maps, trinkets, and baubles.

I've always been attracted to stories about rebels - things that are unusual and sometimes dangerous.

Over the drop, a luminous pond lay below them like a pale magic lantern. It was as if the moon had plummeted into the water and smashed open. Engulfed in darkness, with only a scatter of stars above, the place felt like a bright secret – something ancient and precious.

It had occurred to her many times that on board it didn't matter where you were coming from or where you were heading. Each voyage had its own charisma. Like writing a book – word by word – or crossing a country – step by step – each minute had to be lived moment by moment.

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.

When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time.

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.

When you sit at the back of a room you can keep a check on everything.

There are so many ways to do research - even watching old Ealing comedies, watching people getting on and off buses in London, looking at household interiors.

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

It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.

The smell of roasting meat rose from the street stalls in a sizzle and a fiddle player begged for coin as he rasped a haunting melody. Life could not be more perfect.

I've found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It's possible to make a connection with any kind of writing - as long as the writing is good.

I wondered if that was what I was doing myself – caring so much about something that was so long gone that I was only propping it up.

It's interesting that, given our culture has so many words that refer to women in a truly derogatory fashion, it's 'lady' - a term that has conferred social respect on our gender for over a thousand years - that has women up in arms.

I've never seen an 'English' books section in, well, an English bookshop, but in Scotland, most bookshops have a set of shelves dedicated to Scottish authors.

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.

This investigation felt difficult, like driving in fog.

I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion.

You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, this character's a murderer! Look who did it!.

The fifties is a decade when every year is markedly different from the one before and after. That doesn't happen every decade. 1983 isn't that much different from 1986. But 1953 is very different from 1956.

All those kisses. There must have been a thousand. They engulfed me like some kind of all consuming dream where I became very alive and very relaxed at the same time.

I've always viewed history as my personal treasure chest.

In wartime, she thought to herself, you don't call a death murder.

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

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!

The friendship between officers is tarnished by the need for one or another to be promoted. The kindness of a captain is predicated on the obedience and efficiency of his underlings.

As an historical novelist - there are few jobs more retrospective. I dumped science at an early age.

I'm a library user and I just don't hoard books. To me, they're for sharing.

While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.

I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn - be it chiming in with constructive criticism or giving me sound advice about my career plan.

I'm grateful that I've enjoyed the support of libraries, bookshops and institutional funders.

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.

Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job.

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.

There are as many different kinds of books as there are writers - as many different responses as there are readers.

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.

Personally I estimate about a third of my time is spent on author events, social media and traditional publicity.

In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into.

Escapers were the cream of the crop.

What used to be edgy (divorces) has become mainstream and what used to be mainstream (racism and sexism) has become shocking.

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 spend some time every week in independent bookshops all over the country and what I see is inspiring!

Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world.

If you put Mirabelle into some of the situations she gets into, there is only one way Mirabelle can behave.

I write fast. I'm one of the lucky ones.

We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.

Mirabelle was always an enigma, and he had the sense that if he pushed her, she'd bolt.

Always wise aunts come in many guises. There are maiden aunts, dowager aunts, and that delightful creature, the eccentric aunt. I fear I fall into the latter category.

The Best of Elvis Presley, Doris Day, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Hailey and the Comets, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Frankie Laine all topped the charts in the '50s. Load a playlist of rock n' roll royalty. You're spoilt for choice.

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

He noticed that he felt calmer now she was here, still in that grey dress with her dowdy hat, the air around her redolent with orchid oil. Perhaps all women in England had this effect. Perhaps they all smelled of flowers and exuded a calm and measured purpose. He couldn't remember.

One of the great things about the Fifties is there are so many secrets - people who've come back from the war and done these terrible things that they don't want to think about, or can't say what they did because they signed the Official Secrets Act.

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

People see what they expect to see.

Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn't true.

He cannot think. He can scarcely breathe. But he has no desire to either, he simply wants to keep kissing her.

Playing on her femininity and making him feel uncomfortable seemed highly effective.

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

I like you in green,' he said. 'You look as if you're a very beautiful imp.'

I'm unique - a cosmopolitan mix.

Mirabelle and Vesta have plenty in common because they are facing descrimination in different ways, but they're also a nice contrast.

History at its best is a gritty, dirty business.

It's always been important for writers to be disciplined but now even more so. In addition to the traditional displacement activities like cleaning the fridge or eating cake writers are faced with a plethora of online possibilities (some of which may be professionally worthwhile as well as interesting and fun). As a writer it's important to learn how to focus so you can do both as and when you need to.

Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades.

Something I notice speaking to writers from south of Hadrian's Wall is that the culture is different. At base, I think Scotland values its creative industries differently from England.