Sara Sheridan Quotes - Page 3

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.

An important part of deciding where we want to go, as a society and culture, is knowing where we have come from, and indeed, how far we have come.

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

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

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

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.

I spend a lot of time imagining things - in fact, you could say that imagining things is my job.

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

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.

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

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

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'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.

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.

The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.

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.

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.

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.

There was something unbearable about the damp, dark earth closing over a coffin and the still, empty flesh that was inside. She had attended a hundred funerals, but when you really loved someone there was something too final about a burial. Something brutal.

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

Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist.

Maria didn’t fear the sea but, as taught by her father, she respected its power. In her experience the ocean had no intent to drown travellers.

There was something indomitable about Maria – like Britannia. He’d heard that she kept her head during a Chilean earthquake the year before when men of greater age and experience had panicked. Afterwards she was discovered calmly taking notes, recording the way the land hand risen, for publication, she said.

She wishes her grandmother had not been so protective, and that she understood better what passes between a man and woman. As it is, she simply enjoys the feelings and wonders if they are what lightning is made of, for everything comes back to the weather. Tears like rain. Smiles like the sun. Hair as dry as sand and fear like the dark ocean.

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.

Writers are a product of where we come from but by looking at alternatives to the culture in which we live, we can find ways to change and hopefully improve it.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature.

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

Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

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

The scraps of information she’d gathered knocked against each other, like balls in a pinball machine in one of the arcades on the front. Secrets drew her in every time – the unsaid.

If you've been hurt and you've grieved and you've been through the mill, it takes a long time to get over it.

Scotland consistently produces world-class writers.

I decided to coin the term 'cosy crime noir' for Brighton Belle. That is 'cosy crime' for today's sensibilities because there is that slightly edgy element to it.

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

I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That's not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It's just that I find it quite harrowing and I much prefer if it isn't completely outlined for me because my imagination can do that.

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.

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

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

The net has provided a level playing field for criticism and comment - anyone and everyone is entitled to their opinion - and that is one of its greatest strengths.

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.

My fascination with history is as much about the present as it is about the past.

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'm drawn to the 1950s for lots of reasons - everything from the fashion to the increasing sense of freedom and modernity that builds throughout the decade.

What was it that marked me as a woman and was I prepared to let it go?

I have become very aware how under-represented are the stories of the underprivileged and undervalued. Our records are, in general, very male and if not always the material of the rich, certainly (for obvious reasons) the material of the literate.

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

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

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

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

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