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" I'm unique - a cosmopolitan mix. "

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" There are so many ways to do research - even watching old Ealing comedies, watching people getting on and off buses in London, looking at household interiors. "

" I said: 'I'm throwing in my job, and I'm going to write a book.' Everyone thought: 'She's off her trolley,' and it was quite crazy, really. I'm just lucky that it came off. "

" My family spans many world religions, ethnicities and nationalities. The truth is that I don't have one identity. I'm Scottish, British, European, Humanist, Atheist and in part at least, culturally Jewish. "

" Let's be clear - for people like me, who are obsessed with story and for whom words are their medium, writing is the best job possible. I work hard, but I earn more than the national average wage while I play with my imagination, and for me, that's a dream. "

" I always thought that bagels and lox was my soul food, but it turns out it's sushi. "

" I realized early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job. Because there are no pay grades and very little structure, people make interesting assumptions about the profession. "

" We're all so digital, but the '50s was the era of watches you had to wind. When Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Everest in 1953, Hillary was equipped with a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. "

" Often we don't notice the stringent rules to which our culture subjects us. "

" Personally I estimate about a third of my time is spent on author events, social media and traditional publicity. "

" I've never seen an 'English' books section in, well, an English bookshop, but in Scotland, most bookshops have a set of shelves dedicated to Scottish authors. "

" 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'? "

" I am incredibly jammy. I really am. "

" It's easy to laugh at etiquette, but in a hundred years, our children's grandchildren will almost certainly be laughing at us. "

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

" How lucky am I? Quite often I speak at book festivals, and people ask me how I got published. There's people who have been working on a book for as long as ten years, and I feel like such a cow. "

" The cosmetic industry really took off in the 1950s. "

" People were consuming on average less calories after the war than during the war. Things were still very tough. If you look at the film footage of London streets, even in areas which weren't slums, there are kids in the streets who are dirty and have no shoes on. It was rough. There was a real edge. "

" Scotland just isn't terribly Tory. "

" The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two. "

" Some matters are simply contentious. Sometimes you're never going to get it right. "

" Living in Edinburgh, I consider myself particularly lucky - we have the biggest book festival in the world, a plethora of fascinating libraries and museums, and some of the greatest architecture in Europe. "

" The digital revolution has wrest a little control away from corporate publishers and white, male, middle-aged critics, but the financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession. "

" I wanted to find something I could do at home. I sat down with a friend and made a list of all the things I could try, and one of them was writing a novel. "

" If I hadn't been able to get my first book published, I am not sure what I would have done. "

" I write fast. I'm one of the lucky ones. "

" One of the great things about the Fifties is there are so many secrets - people who've come back from the war and done these terrible things that they don't want to think about, or can't say what they did because they signed the Official Secrets Act. "

" 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. "

" I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn - be it chiming in with constructive criticism or giving me sound advice about my career plan. "

" I have an ambivalent relationship with Margaret Thatcher. She came to power in May 1979 - a month before my 11th birthday. I was far too young to have developed a great deal of political awareness. I remember it, though - my mother excited at the dinner table because Britain had its first female prime minister. "

" I wrote 'I'm Me' because I was asked to write a children's book. "