Sara Sheridan

It's always been important for writers to be disciplined but now even more so. In addition to the traditional displacement activities like cleaning the fridge or eating cake writers are faced with a plethora of online possibilities (some of which may be professionally worthwhile as well as interesting and fun). As a writer it's important to learn how to focus so you can do both as and when you need to.

Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think.

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.

Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!

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

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.

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

If you tempted a poor man with a fortune, who could blame the fellow for taking what he could?

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.

Covert operations relied on the unguarded slip, the unconscious choosing of one word over another.

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

This investigation felt difficult, like driving in fog._

Mirabelle was always an enigma, and he had the sense that if he pushed her, she__ bolt.

The scraps of information she__ 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.

He cannot think. He can scarcely breathe. But he has no desire to either, he simply wants to keep kissing her.

When you want something badly enough it__ amazing what you__l ignore.

Wellsted will remember this moment for the rest of his life. It is the first time he desires something for himself that is not dedicated to his own advancement. It is the moment he falls in love.

My fascination with history is as much about the present as it is about the past.