Sara Sheridan

It's entirely possible to base an entire book on a long-forgotten letter.

It may take a village to raise a baby, but hell! it takes an army to produce a book.

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.

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

It took a certain kind of person to come from luxury and seek out danger.

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

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.

Aunts offer kids an opportunity to try out ideas that don't chime with their parents and they also demonstrate that people can get on, love each other and live together without necessarily being carbon copies.

Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.

He often came back __ll thinky_ from work.

Only a man with nothing to hide could make that kind of racket.

On of the prerequisites for my mobile phone is that I have to be able to fling it at a wall if I lose my temper.

The financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.

It is one of the benchmarks of a culture I always think _ the page at which it operates. A good way to measure it is to order a taxi and see how irate local people get if it is late.

I'm proud of the culture I come from - we're a small country and a close-knit community.

As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it's our literary heritage that is at risk - a vital part of our culture.

He__ more a shape in a drape than a hep cat

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.