Sara Sheridan

“You became the sum total of where you lived, where you shopped, which church you went to, how many kids you had and which taxi company you used, and you only associated with people who had the same responses on their list.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The world is changing and you’re only just becoming accustomed to it. You’re changing, I suppose. You’ve changed since I’ve known you.’‘How?’‘You’ve come more alive.”

“How lucky am I? Quite often I speak at book festivals, and people ask me how I got published. There's people who have been working on a book for as long as ten years, and I feel like such a cow.”

“Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real.”

“I believe the era of the militant lady is back.”

“His heart is pounding and when he kisses her it is as if the whole of Riyadh disappears – the wide sky, the hard surface of the roof, the date palms and the water wells.”

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

“It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.”

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

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

“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.”

“When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time.”

“One of the great things about the Fifties is there are so many secrets - people who've come back from the war and done these terrible things that they don't want to think about, or can't say what they did because they signed the Official Secrets Act.”

“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 was asked the other day in which era I would choose to live. As a historical novelist, it comes up sometimes. As a woman I'd have to say I'd like to live in the future - I want to see where these centuries of change are leading us.”

“Sometimes life isn’t what we want, it’s what we get.”

“He tasted of whisky and his skin was rough where he hadn’t shaved, but Mirabelle kissed him back.”

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