Sara Sheridan Quotes - Page 5

It is one of the benchmarks of a culture I always think – the page at which it operates. A good way to measure it is to order a taxi and see how irate local people get if it is late.

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

Mirabelle always ate her lunch on Brighton beach if the weather was in any way passable, but out of sheer principle she never paid tuppence for a chair. We did not win the war to have to pay to sit down, she frequently found herself thinking.

I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.

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

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 had never really understood what an adventure life could be, if you followed your heart and did what you really wanted to do, which is what we must all do in the end.

Today women have the rights and equality our Victorian sisters could only dream of, and with those privileges comes the responsibility of standing up and being counted.

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

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.

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

Often we don't notice the stringent rules to which our culture subjects us.

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.

This investigation felt difficult, like driving in fog.

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!

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

If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we’d have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it sometimes becomes much more problematic because they’re erratic. People do crazy things that don’t make sense.

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

You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.

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

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.

Edinburgh is alive with words.

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

Covert operations relied on the unguarded slip, the unconscious choosing of one word over another.

Being able to read well in public and talk about your work in an engaging fashion is part of most writers' job specification.

When she first moved to Brighton, the flat on the Lawns had felt luxurious and it had seemed as if she was settling down, sleeping in the same bed every night, the darkness uninterrupted by any hint of emergency. It had felt as if all her difficulties were over.

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

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