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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"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."
"Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities."
"Once you're on the pleasure express, it's hard to get off and switch to another, slower service."
"You can't trust anyone you have to pay, and really, they can't trust you."
"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."
"Kindness was too painful. It had been a long time since he had had to endure it."
"Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content."
"I believe that being able to communicate directly with readers is a boon. I certainly enjoy it as much as they do."
"The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more."
"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."
"When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time."
"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."
"Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists."
"We are living in glorious days where each readers' voice can be heard."
"Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job."
"Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature."
"Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist."
"Aye, I'm tellin' ye, happiness is one of the few things in this world that doubles every time you share it with someone else."
"When a chap is passionate, the readership can sense it."
"While I'm frustrated at the amount I'm expected to take on in the present, the 1950s woman was frustrated by being excluded - not being allowed to take things on at all."
"We are home to each other now."
"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."
"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!."
"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."
"The good thing about the aristocracy " German or English " was that they were easily traced, Mirabelle thought."
"I spend a lot of time imagining things - in fact, you could say that imagining things is my job."
"As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too."
"When you're depressed you retreat and you go into a smaller world. This is why Brighton worked well for the story, because it's a smaller world than London."
"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."
"Only a man with nothing to hide could make that kind of racket."
"Writing about the 1950s has given me tremendous respect for my mother's generation."
"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."
"He prefers his adventures second hand."
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