Sara Sheridan Quotes

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

It's always been important for writers to be disciplined but now even more so. In addition to the traditional displacement activities like cleaning the fridge or eating cake writers are faced with a plethora of online possibilities (some of which may be professionally worthwhile as well as interesting and fun). As a writer it's important to learn how to focus so you can do both as and when you need to.

~ Sara Sheridan

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!

~ Sara Sheridan

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

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

Writers need each other.

~ Sara Sheridan

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

~ Sara Sheridan

One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.

~ Sara Sheridan

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

~ Sara Sheridan

Scotland consistently produces world-class writers.

~ Sara Sheridan

Writers are a product of where we come from but by looking at alternatives to the culture in which we live, we can find ways to change and hopefully improve it.

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

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

~ Sara Sheridan

I am torn between the freedom of this adventure and the benefits of civilization despite its constraints.

~ Sara Sheridan

He prefers his adventures second hand.

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

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

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

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

~ Sara Sheridan

Those who have not been stung will hardly fear a bee the same as those who have.

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

He’s more a shape in a drape than a hep cat

~ Sara Sheridan

The financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.

~ Sara Sheridan

As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it's our literary heritage that is at risk - a vital part of our culture.

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

I'm proud of the culture I come from - we're a small country and a close-knit community.

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

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

~ Sara Sheridan

He often came back ‘all thinky’ from work.

~ Sara Sheridan

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

~ Sara Sheridan

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.

~ Sara Sheridan

Aunts offer kids an opportunity to try out ideas that don't chime with their parents and they also demonstrate that people can get on, love each other and live together without necessarily being carbon copies.

~ Sara Sheridan

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

~ Sara Sheridan

It took a certain kind of person to come from luxury and seek out danger.

~ Sara Sheridan

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

~ Sara Sheridan

I have become very aware how under-represented are the stories of the underprivileged and undervalued. Our records are, in general, very male and if not always the material of the rich, certainly (for obvious reasons) the material of the literate.

~ Sara Sheridan

On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signing desk.

~ Sara Sheridan