Quotes from Sara Sheridan

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.

When the first book out my sister-in-law read it and we were chatting at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and she said, "Oh my God, chapter six, sex and a murder," and her five year old wandered into the kitchen and said, "Sixty hamburgers?

We might give her presents, tell some tales, but would she ever be able to really understand what the journey had been like for us?

A flock of small birds took off from the wall of the fort. They moved like a length of dark silk caught by the breeze as they headed out to sea. Behind them, the sky was the colour of forget-me-nots. The sun blazed.

We are home to each other now.

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

Whereas Mirabelle is tall, thin and sad, Vesta is physically and emotionally her opposite.

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.

I had never done anything yet that was conventional – why should the love of my life be any different?

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

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

I found out pretty quickly that there is a lot of money to be made if you can become the kind of woman who doesn't look like the kind of woman she is.

The new contract between writers and readers is one I'm prepared to sign up to. I've met some fascinating people at events and online. Down with the isolation of writers I say! And long live Twitter.

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

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.

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

You don't know what the hell you look like when you're just some little schoolgirl.

I'm in my 40s and I'm constantly surprised by how much my childhood still plays a part in my life.

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

Communism," I observed, "is a pile of wank.

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.

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.