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"Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds."
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"Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds."
Author Name
Personal Development
"With Cold Sassy Tree having its first production, I saw no necessity to do anything other than produce it with the correct setting."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"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."
Creativity
"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."
Literature
"It seemed to me that these months of watching and listening, second-guessing words and phrases, seeking so much that was new, had somehow changed me."
Growth
"Only a man with nothing to hide could make that kind of racket."
Integrity
"I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of my job."
Research
"I have a very strong sense that we only know where we are by looking clearly at where we've come from."
Reflection
"The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial."
Politics
"You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story."
Creativity
"In crime books it's possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it's new. Nowadays it's part of our world and we can simply assume that knowledge if we write about it."
Crime
"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."
Writing
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