Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nick Hornby's a genius.
I don't think my first book was chick lit.
My mother had breast cancer when she was 39.
I always wanted to write psychological thrillers.
Sometimes you need to be shaken out of a situation.
The older I get, the more I love psychological thrillers.
I married someone I didn't love. I was too polite to say no.
Freedom came in strange forms and from unexpected directions.
You feel undervalued when you write the kind of fiction I write.
No man ever fell in love with me for the way I fill out a Lycra dress.
My parents' marriage was, on an aesthetic level, very pleasing to behold.
All my main characters have got bits of me, bits of my family, bits of my friends.
The only way you can write about a happy family in a drama is to make them unhappy.
I think that not being proactive is a good thing. I like life to unfold on its own.
That's always the way in life: the longer you leave things, the harder they are to do.
For me, the optimum circumstances for writing a book are those of stultifying routine.
If you feel that your father was lacking as a husband, it affects your own choice of man.
Getting married young was the worst experience of my life. It was horrible - really horrible.
My father was a self-employed textile agent, and the shop below his office was an art gallery.
I look about my house and see there are lots of lovely things in it, but I constantly buy more.
In 1995, I was 27, and I completely got caught up in Blur and Oasis and the fashion of the time.
I am the oldest of three girls and the only one not named after one of my father's ex-girlfriends.
Flowers would be wasted on me. I don't like valentines. I don't need gifts. I'm a pragmatic romantic.
They say that your powers of memory are at their peak when you're 26, and it's all downhill after that.
I knew I wasn't the sort of person who could do a full-time job and write in the evening and at weekends.
When I was a little girl, I was a real, drippy bookworm. But when I went into fashion, I stopped reading.
My mother was born on February 8, 1944, in Lucknow, India. Her father, Albert, was half-Indian and half-Portuguese.
I like the fact that my husband and I have been together for a long time and have a warm and colourful history together.
It's the people who seem weak who are always suprisingly strong, and the ones who seem strong who are unexpectledly weak.
I changed my mind about being a famous pop star when I realised that it meant I'd never be able to get on the Tube again.
My first husband dragged me out of London and made me live in the suburbs in Surrey - not where you want to be when you're 23.
Every brilliant book I read is an influence and an inspiration. As is every brilliant movie I watch and every brilliant box set.
Whenever I watch any kind of competition, my immediate reaction when they call out the name of the winner is to look at the loser.
'Ralph's Party' was supposed to be a psychological thriller, but I fell in love with all my characters and wanted only the best for them.
If you can start and finish a book, then you're already a million miles ahead of all those people who talk about wanting to write a book.
My publishers find me really challenging, as a lot of the time, I don't even know what I'm going to be writing about until I sit down to do it.
A strange side effect of sudden success is the sense that if you can succeed in one field, then it might well be worth trying to succeed in another.
I was made redundant from a job as a PA in a shirt-making company in 1996. I was devastated. I had been there for three years, and it was a job I really liked.
I don't really get into a writing routine until March or April, when I'll write a few hundred words a day, often in a cafe in the morning after the school run.
Agents and publishers are always looking for something 'different,' a fresh viewpoint and a new voice, not just re-hashed versions of stuff that's gone before.
When I travel, I can leave everything at home apart from books. I curate my holiday reading rigorously and would be devastated if I found I'd left one at home.
I would never, for the sake of the story or a twist, have a character do something that they just wouldn't do. I really couldn't. I'd rather miss out on the twist.
I write in cafes, never at home. I cannot focus at home, am forever getting off my chair to do other things. In a cafe, I have to sit still, or I'll look a bit unhinged.
There's something uniquely unsettling about the unhinged woman on a single-minded mission. Especially when she's the last person you ever imagined to harbour a dark and seething soul.
There's a weird contrast between my usual daily routine and then my book coming out. It's like someone's just suddenly opened the curtains in a dark room, and everyone's looking at you.
I never had one of those glorious young bodies that make older men and women weep. So I don't tend to look back with nostalgia or yearn for what I've lost. Because it was never all that.
My father, Anthony, was a textile agent who sold fabric in the West End and was away a lot. He was very glamorous. When he first met my mum, he swept her off into this big, social world.
My marriage is far from perfect. We're not hand-holdy and soft. We are snippy and bickery. We sleep in separate beds because we have no tolerance of each other's night-time idiosyncrasies.
I take the six weeks of the school summer holidays off because I'm pretty sure I'm not going to look back on my life one day and say, 'Damn, I wish I hadn't spent so much time with my children.'
There are people out there who would enjoy my books but wouldn't pick them up because they think it's not going to be for them. I find it infuriating.There's a lot more going on in my books than just romance.