Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Chick lit was amazing, and I was thrilled to be part of it.
As a teenager, you are still entirely wrapped up in yourself.
And then there was him, the long and painful love of her life.
I wanted to write stories I wanted to read, that I and my friends related to.
Fantasies are absolutely safe, as long as you never try to make them a reality.
Anyone can live in a house, but homes are created with patience, time and love.
When I was a student, I had a part time job as a barmaid at a dodgy pub in Kent.
I believe it is the flaws that make us interesting, our backgrounds, the hardships.
I have spent many a night in an Internet chat room, but not since I've been married.
Whether you are inspired or not, the only way to unlock your creativity, is to start writing.
Every time my dreams threaten to become reality, something always happens and I end up alone.
The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill.
My favorite part of speaking at events has never been the speaking, but the reading of my books.
I consider myself pretty fearless, but the one thing I have always been frightened of is cancer.
As Carrie Fisher once said in a film, everyone thinks they have good taste and a sense of humour.
Writing is a muscle that needs to be exercised every day: The more you write, the easier it becomes.
I have a gorgeous office at home but tend not to write there because there are so many distractions.
Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously.
I do know that I have always been one of life's observers, always standing slightly on the outside, watching.
When you're working from home and you've got children, a big night out is going to Pizza Express down the road.
Melanoma is not the most common of skin cancers, but it is the most dangerous if not found in the early stages.
I think friendship is more important than love, but that love that grows out of friendship is the very best of all.
I am not someone who's very good at looking after herself, and I am also not someone who goes on holiday very often.
I am not a big skier, but I love apres-ski wear and imagine I would look great in an all-white, fur-trimmed ski suit.
What I want in a good beach read is sunshine, drama, easy-reading and transportation to another world and other people's problems.
For me, decorating perfection means eclectic styles and collections of beautiful things like pottery, pillboxes and match strikers.
I love getting out the house because writing is such a solitary business that even being at the library makes me feel part of the world.
I treated the first few books as a very long journalistic exercise. I thought of every chapter as an article that needed to be finished.
I have long been fascinated by our inclination to assume others we meet have the same moral code, similar values, and yet we can never be sure.
My e-books sales have overtaken everything else, so I think all the marketing has become very much driven by the author now because of social media.
Sadly, I don't think books ever sell based on your name alone - the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong!
I am very busy, life is very busy, and I was, I think, a somewhat lazy friend. I love them, I know they love me, but I didn't make much of an effort.
Having struggled with food issues and eating disorders myself, particularly when I was younger, I've long been interested in using it within my books.
I show the people I love that I love them by gathering them in my kitchen and feeding them, so no surprise that most of my characters do the same thing.
I started to think about the assumptions we make that everyone we meet operates under the same moral code, and how betrayed we feel when that isn't the case.
My teens and 20s were spent lying on sheets of tinfoil in the weak English sun, covered in baby oil. In Greece and France I would burn, then turn a dark brown.
I have been incredibly lucky with my novels but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would be interested in a cookbook. So I started to think about self-publishing.
I'd like to think I'm not quite so pretentious as to think my characters go off and live their lives once I've written the final page and switched the computer off.
What I've come to learn with self-publishing is that if you want to provide readers with something of equal quality, it requires the same amount of time and expense.
I have spent many a night in an Internet chat room, but not since I've been married. I don't do the chat rooms anymore, but I have become completely addicted to Ebay.
Twice a year, I take myself off to a self-imposed 'writer's retreat', staying at a small inn or on a friend's farm, where I am all alone and do nothing other than write.
I read so much about men who aren't what they seem, and particularly stories written by women who found out their husbands had a slew of secrets they knew nothing about.
My husband has a cousin who discovered, in his fifties, that the man he thought was his father was actually not, and that he had not only a father he had never met, but brothers.
I think relationships are very difficult. It's very easy to get swept away with excitement, glamour, and passion. I think the trick is to look for friendship rather than passion.
You are the best person I've met in years, and if I'd met you in a year's time, or maybe even a few months, I know we could be happy together, but I can't give you what you need.
By the time I sat down to write 'Family Pictures,' I hadn't written anything in almost two years, and writing, I have discovered, is a muscle: if it isn't exercised, it will atrophy.
I am Superwoman. I am the author of 15 novels, including one about cancer. I am not, however, someone who 'gets' cancer. I am a sun worshipper who never thought it could happen to me.
In my small, coastal New England town, an hour outside New York, I know many people who have dealt with cancer. I can reel off the names of at least 15 women I know, all in their 40s.
It's about thinking that being blonde and slim and perfect will automatically bring you happiness, and then discovering that life is full of as many disappointments as there were before.
I think perhaps we all cook to feed some kind of hunger in ourselves. I am nourished by being surrounded by family and friends, by creating something delicious for them, by nurturing them.