Time & Perspective Quote by Sidney Sheldon

There is a quiet flex tucked inside Sheldon’s plainspoken professionalism: research as both passport and alibi. “Customs and attitudes” signals he isn’t just hunting postcard scenery; he’s after social weather, the invisible rules that make a place feel legible on the page. Pair that with “interviewing the people who live there” and you get a writer staking a claim to authenticity, preemptively answering the critique that bestselling fiction is slick, generic, or culturally shallow. He wants the reader to feel safe in his hands.

The subtext is also strategic. Sheldon wrote propulsion-driven novels built on speed, glamour, and international intrigue. Locations in that kind of storytelling can become interchangeable “exotic” backdrops. By foregrounding labor - time spent, people consulted - he reframes the globe-trotting as craft rather than consumption. It’s a defense of the commercial novelist’s legitimacy: yes, the plots are page-turners, but the world is researched, earned.

“Over 90 countries” lands like a statistic because it’s meant to. It converts experience into authority, a résumé line that doubles as marketing: if you buy a Sheldon novel, you’re buying access to the world. Contextually, it fits a late-20th-century mass-market appetite for internationalism - jet travel, espionage fantasies, the idea that sophistication is measured in stamps on a passport. The line walks a fine edge between respect and appropriation, but its intent is clear: to promise that his fiction’s global sheen has real human contact beneath it.