Quotes from Sara Sheridan

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.

The best historical stories capture the modern imagination because they are, in many senses, still current - part of a continuum.

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

Most fellas like the races, though, Miss. It's only human nature

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.

The old London was fading from her memory. She no longer expected to see the shops that had been bombed when she passed familiar streets. In many places the sites were being redeveloped. That's what seemed real now – the new buildings and the flats above them. As she hit her stride, Mirabelle smiled. It felt good to be in the big city again and on her way.

Sometimes life isn't what we want, it's what we get.

You have no future when the past rules you.

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

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.

People responded to body language without even thinking. It was important to get it absolutely right.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre.

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

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.

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.

The sound of pencils taking notes provided a low scrape and hum, almost like radio interference.