Sara Sheridan Quotes

At the end of the day, that's what a family is - a group of different people who accept each other.

He often came back ‘all thinky’ from work.

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

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!

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.

I am completely unflustered by whichever medium people choose to read my words. I'm just delighted they're reading them at all!

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

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

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

Digital distribution has widened the reading world.

Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

I am more one for the story, I think, than the action.

I'm a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.

Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real.

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.

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

One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.

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?

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