"Books exist for me not as physical entities with pages and binding, but in the province of my mind."

"The best historical stories capture the modern imagination because they are, in many senses, still current - part of a continuum."

"The new contract between writers and readers is one I'm prepared to sign up to. I've met some fascinating people at events and online. Down with the isolation of writers I say! And long live Twitter."

"I had loved poetry and the theatre. Now I loved adventure more."

"Social and cultural history is often comprised of whatever diaries and letters remain and that is down to chance and wide open to interpretation."

"I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn."

"You have no future when the past rules you."

"It occurred to me that as a man I could do anything, everything I wanted."

"When you fake emotion for a living, when you make your money providing fantasies for other people, tuning into their worlds and indulging them, you don't invite someone into your world very easily."

"No one's book is perfect."

"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!."

"It's part of a writer's job to be nosy about everything."

"Today women have the rights and equality our Victorian sisters could only dream of, and with those privileges comes the responsibility of standing up and being counted."

"If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we'd have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it sometimes becomes much more problematic because they're erratic. People do crazy things that don't make sense."

"I wondered if that was what I was doing myself " caring so much about something that was so long gone that I was only propping it up."

"If peace came it would have to do so when there had been time to allow the hatred to grow out of people's thinking."

"The library is a symbol of freedom."

"I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living."

"A flock of small birds took off from the wall of the fort. They moved like a length of dark silk caught by the breeze as they headed out to sea. Behind them, the sky was the colour of forget-me-nots. The sun blazed."

"Escapers were the cream of the crop."

"It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one's judgement."

"The smell of roasting meat rose from the street stalls in a sizzle and a fiddle player begged for coin as he rasped a haunting melody. Life could not be more perfect."

"I pride myself on making my own decisions, sir," she said. "I do not welcome gentlemen making them for me."

"You couldn't predict what was going to happen for one simple reason: people."

"As a novelist it is my job to tell stories that inspire and entertain but I am increasingly mindful that many of these historical tales (which of themselves are fascinating) relate directly to our issues in society today."

"The sky was a sparkling succession of black diamonds on black velvet made crystal clear by the blackout."

"When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time."

"It is one of the benchmarks of a culture I always think " the page at which it operates. A good way to measure it is to order a taxi and see how irate local people get if it is late."

"I knew that I was talented. I was positive about that. I wasn't sure exactly what I was talented at, but I was ambitious enough to wait it out and see what turned up."

"Communism, I observed, "is a pile of wank."

"She was herself in their company but a very specific version of herself."

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

"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."

"Cases fired by emotion rather than money were dangerous."

"At the end of the day, that's what a family is - a group of different people who accept each other."

"The old London was fading from her memory. She no longer expected to see the shops that had been bombed when she passed familiar streets. In many places the sites were being redeveloped. That's what seemed real now " the new buildings and the flats above them. As she hit her stride, Mirabelle smiled. It felt good to be in the big city again and on her way."

"People see what they expect to see."

"The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more."

"There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument."

"Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind."

"We are home to each other now."

"We don't live in a society that has genuine equality, and every woman we know has experienced that."

"Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring."

"We had laid down the law : no chocolate, no sex."

"Such a night cannot be shaken from a woman's memory. Such a night changes your life forever."

"The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction."

"Her eyes betrayed no shock at the sights of the quay as they unfolded " not the sweating deckhands, the prostitutes crowding the ship, the hubbub of stalls, including one where three slaves were for sale, their ankles manacled. She might as well have been walking through a country garden as she moved inexorably away from the water."

"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."

"He finds himself bored by the shenanigans of highly spirited young men. Their concerns reside somewhere between balder and dash."

"Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital."