Quotes by Sara Sheridan

All those kisses. There must have been a thousand. They engulfed me like some kind of all consuming dream where I became very alive and very relaxed at the same time.

Sometimes you don’t even have to have sex at all, and for that kind of sicko, you charge double.

She wishes her grandmother had not been so protective, and that she understood better what passes between a man and woman. As it is, she simply enjoys the feelings and wonders if they are what lightning is made of, for everything comes back to the weather. Tears like rain. Smiles like the sun. Hair as dry as sand and fear like the dark ocean.

It occurred to me that as a man I could do anything, everything I wanted.

What was it that marked me as a woman and was I prepared to let it go?

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.

We had laid down the law : no chocolate, no sex.

When the first book out my sister-in-law read it and we were chatting at 5 oclock 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?

Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.

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.

Ive always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

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.

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 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.

Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.

When you think about the period in which Agatha Christies crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time.

I decided to coin the term cosy crime noir for Brighton Belle. That is cosy crime for todays sensibilities because there is that slightly edgy element to it.

I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. Thats not to say that graphic violence does not exist. Its just that I find it quite harrowing and I much prefer if it isnt completely outlined for me because my imagination can do that.

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 characters a murderer! Look who did it!.

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.