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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."
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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."
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Personal Development
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"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."
Writing
"Communism, I observed, "is a pile of wank."
Politics
"It took a certain kind of person to come from luxury and seek out danger."
Courage
"I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion."
Intuition
"Today is the anniversary of my husband's death," Maria announced. It was a dramatic statement, but the occasion seemed to demand it. "And I am going to leave."
Grief
"People who inspire such contradictory emotions must be worthwhile, I reasoned."
Relationship
"Books exist for me not as physical entities with pages and binding, but in the province of my mind."
Knowledge
"My fascination with history is as much about the present as it is about the past."
History
"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 character's a murderer! Look who did it!."
Writing
"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."
Society
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