Quotes from Sara Sheridan

Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living. that's the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn't matter if it's a hundred years or only a few weeks. It's all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers.

Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds.

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

I was middle class and fucked up and spoilt.

I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business.

The smog curled between the streetlamps and the spokes of the wrought iron framework. It seemed through your body and into your bones.

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

Edinburgh is alive with words.

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

Writing is a profession that has no real career structure and your best advice when you hit a difficulty is probably going to come from another writer one or two rungs on the career ladder ahead of you.

Our children make us so vulnerable. Our parents too, I suppose.

I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

I would rather be a spinster than sold off, traded in, whatever they may call it.

Writers have a well-deserved reputation for being eccentric. Everything you've heard is true.

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.

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

On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signing desk.

Research material can turn up anywhere - in a dusty old letter in an archive, a journal or some old photographs you find in a charity shop.

I didn't expect to love being online as much as I do. I've met some wonderful people and discovered that however arcane some of my interests that there are people out there who are interested too.

It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes.

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.

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

Very often the characters people respond best to have little parts of reality they can relate to.