"We might give her presents, tell some tales, but would she ever be able to really understand what the journey had been like for us?"

"There was something indomitable about Maria " like Britannia. He'd heard that she kept her head during a Chilean earthquake the year before when men of greater age and experience had panicked. Afterwards she was discovered calmly taking notes, recording the way the land hand risen, for publication, she said."

"Everyone was important during the war. Everyone. We worked together and we won."

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

"I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there."

"I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job."

"It was as if she was a dream, like London, which he could not entirely grasp and of which he was not worthy. He wanted to be part of it but had forgotten how. It seemed extraordinary and strange that this paragon among women had condescended to travel on his ship. In fact, she'd insisted upon it. Her presence was at once otherworldly and familiar, none of which explained why his brain ceased to function when he was in her company."

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

"There is something particularly fascinating about seeing places you know in a piece of art - be that in a film, or a photograph, or a painting."

"A writer is like a stick of rock - the words go right through."

"Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real."

"I'm a professional writer and I consider it part of my job to publicise my work and these days part of that job is done online."

"They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?"

"Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world."

"I love writing, and just as much, I love undertaking research."

"A paucity of material can open up just as many possibilities."

"In a heartbeat, he understands why religions are born on the sands " there is nothing here for a man but his own mind."

"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."

"Mrs Beaumont shrugged. 'Dougie travelled light in life,' she said. 'He knew it was people who were important."

"I believe the era of the militant lady is back."

"I had never really understood what an adventure life could be, if you followed your heart and did what you really wanted to do, which is what we must all do in the end."

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

"There are as many different kinds of books as there are writers - as many different responses as there are readers."

"I'm in my 40s and I'm constantly surprised by how much my childhood still plays a part in my life."

"Sometimes life isn't what we want, it's what we get."

"History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not."

"In the 1950s at least less was expected of women. Now we're supposed to build a career, build a home, be the supermum that every child deserves, the perfect wife, meet the demands of elderly parents, and still stay sane."

"Many existing top 20 Scottish writers have flourished in part because of good turns done by institutions, arts community, libraries and bookshops."

"The smog curled between the streetlamps and the spokes of the wrought iron framework. It seemed through your body and into your bones."

"One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real."

"I'm a library user and I just don't hoard books. To me, they're for sharing."

"Over the drop, a luminous pond lay below them like a pale magic lantern. It was as if the moon had plummeted into the water and smashed open. Engulfed in darkness, with only a scatter of stars above, the place felt like a bright secret " something ancient and precious."

"I am more one for the story, I think, than the action."

"I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary."

"The question shouldn't be, 'Are we guilty about our Colonial past?' it should be, 'Why aren't we more guilty about our corporate present?"

"An important part of deciding where we want to go, as a society and culture, is knowing where we have come from, and indeed, how far we have come."

"Having instant feedback on twitter to research material I'm considering is an enormous help."

"She enjoyed the sights and sounds of the dockside " ports were places of freedom."

"The space where I write is in my head, I suppose."

"When you want something badly enough it's amazing what you'll ignore."

"In the industry, trying out new genres is not always encouraged but what I've discovered is that as a writer, a jaunt outside my comfort zone generally brings new skills to the main body of my work."

"During the war some of the country's sharpest minds had looked as if they had been dragged through a hedge backwards."

"The daily chocolate left Will in high spirits, so that some days he believed he could wheel with the gulls that fished the foaming water close to shore. Now that he felt so free, it came to him that the corner of England, which up till now had been his whole universe, was in fact only a scrap of a boundless realm."

"The scraps of information she'd 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."

"A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind's eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own " a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets."

"Sometimes a person's first assumption was very telling. It revealed how they perceived the situation."

"It is through our extended family that we first learn to compromise and come to an understanding that even if we don't always agree about things we can still love and look out for each other."

"While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another."

"Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction."

"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."