"It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes."

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

"Most people do a good deal of whatever they do motivated by love. For me, few stories are truly complete without it."

"They march into the future to the rhythm of the past."

"You can't trust anyone you have to pay, and really, they can't trust you."

"An eerie atmosphere leeched from the soot-damaged walls. It was as if the house had died, and yet she felt she belonged here. It was as if the old place wanted to claim her from the grave."

"Once you're on the pleasure express, it's hard to get off and switch to another, slower service."

"Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities."

"Writing about the 1950s has given me tremendous respect for my mother's generation."

"I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction."

"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."

"Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades."

"The moon was low but not full. The men set out along the dock in conversation. As they dropped onto the dark beach, Simmons declared, 'There can be no better place in the world than this.'Henderson had to agree. The beach was beautiful. The stars lit the sand and balmy air rode in as the waves washed up on paradise."

"When the first book out my sister-in-law read it and we were chatting at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and she said, "Oh my God, chapter six, sex and a murder," and her five year old wandered into the kitchen and said, "Sixty hamburgers?"

"I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head."

"As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective."

"I didn't want to give up my job and join the ranks of the Doing Fuck All brigade no matter how much money I had in the bank."

"That boy is talented. You don't develop those gifts in houses or in schools."

"I've found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It's possible to make a connection with any kind of writing - as long as the writing is good."

"An aunt is a safe haven for a child. Someone who will keep your secrets and is always on your side."

"A chap's impending death has a way of focusing the mind."

"I've always had a keen sense of history. My father was an antiques dealer and he used to bring home boxes full of treasures, and each item always had a tale attached."

"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."

"Researching books gets you into nothing but trouble."

"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."

"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."

"Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds."

"I've always been attracted to stories about rebels - things that are unusual and sometimes dangerous."

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

"For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure."

"Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist."

"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!"

"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."

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

"Afternoon drinkers shifted in the gloom as if they sensed new blood."

"In wartime people took action because of what they believed in. In peacetime people were driven by their private concerns."

"It had occurred to her many times that on board it didn't matter where you were coming from or where you were heading. Each voyage had its own charisma. Like writing a book " word by word " or crossing a country " step by step " each minute had to be lived moment by moment."

"Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature."

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

"Google maps are one thing but there's no substitute for pounding the beat and I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to break into the back of the houses on Belgrave Place. Once I even for followed by a suspicious householder - I'd been hanging around staring at the exterior of his flat for too long."

"People are so different in wartime. No one gets to be ordinary. Not really."

"For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists."

"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."

"Mirabelle always ate her lunch on Brighton beach if the weather was in any way passable, but out of sheer principle she never paid tuppence for a chair. We did not win the war to have to pay to sit down, she frequently found herself thinking."

"I was asked the other day in which era I would choose to live. As a historical novelist, it comes up sometimes. As a woman I'd have to say I'd like to live in the future - I want to see where these centuries of change are leading us."

"When she first moved to Brighton, the flat on the Lawns had felt luxurious and it had seemed as if she was settling down, sleeping in the same bed every night, the darkness uninterrupted by any hint of emergency. It had felt as if all her difficulties were over."

"I have a very strong sense that we only know where we are by looking clearly at where we've come from."

"Most fellas like the races, though, Miss. It's only human nature."

"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."

"In wartime, she thought to herself, you don't call a death murder."