Zitat des Tages von Jane Green:
I have spent many a night in an Internet chat room, but not since I've been married.
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 had just got married when I started writing my fourth novel. I'd come back from honeymoon, moved into our first house - a gorgeous little carriage house in London - and made my office on the third floor, overlooking the treetops in North West London.
I am not someone who's very good at looking after herself, and I am also not someone who goes on holiday very often.
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.
The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill.
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.
As someone who is displaced - I left London almost fifteen years ago to make Connecticut my home - I am drawn to stories about people who don't belong, whether physically or emotionally, and who find their families of choice in their friends.
The life of a bestselling novelist sounds like it ought to be spectacularly glamorous and fun, but in fact I spend most of my time incognito, and in fact were you to pass me in the street you would think I was just another dowdy suburban mom.
I always thought I'd be the quintessential Earth Mother, but when I had Harrison, I really wasn't the natural mother that I always thought I would be. I adore children, but I was never that interested in newborn babies.
I have learned that it is imperative that I make time for my friends, that they demand to be as much a part of the mix as my family and my work, and perhaps more so, because they are not an inevitability.
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.
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 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.
When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American.
I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel.
For me, 'Bookends' marks the start of my foray into commercial fiction, away from what has always been thought of as more traditional chick lit - single girl in the city trips around in Manolos looking for Mr. Right.
I adore children, but I was never that interested in new born babies. It's a terrible thing to have to admit, and you're not supposed to think that way as a woman, but everyone promises it's different when you have your own. It wasn't for me, though.
I do know that I have always been one of life's observers, always standing slightly on the outside, watching.
I consider myself pretty fearless, but the one thing I have always been frightened of is cancer.
I have a deep and passionate love of America. It is where I have always thought I would be happiest, and although I miss England desperately, I find that my heart definitely has its home over here.
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.
Just as there are moments when the words flow and it feels like the easiest job in the world, there are many more when I think I have nothing to say, and my journalism training taught me that writing is a job, that you write whether you are inspired or not, and that the only way to unlock creativity is to write through it.
I no longer think you can live without passion.
When you're working from home and you've got children, a big night out is going to Pizza Express down the road.
I had always presumed that my first book would be published, but I never dreamt that I would write 15 bestsellers and have this wonderful life in America that I have entirely built for myself.
My favorite part of speaking at events has never been the speaking, but the reading of my books.
Writing is a muscle that needs to be exercised every day: The more you write, the easier it becomes.
I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.
I wanted to write stories I wanted to read, that I and my friends related to.
I have a business manager and a book-keeper who deals with our household bills. My husband and I sit down with her for a weekly report on how much money is going out, but I'm not terribly interested, and I don't have the patience for it.
A friend of mine suddenly announced she had written a novel and got a publishing deal; I thought, 'Hang on... if she can do it, I can bloody well do it, too.' That novel went to a bidding war, and went on to be a huge best-seller.
I now realise how liberating all-inclusive resorts are. No carrying huge handbags anywhere. No having to worry about purses being pinched. No totting up the price in your head and fretting that you've spent too much.
I spent the first summer after my diagnosis creeping about in giant sun hats and tents, cursing the sun, staying inside as much as possible. Now I am beginning to think the most important thing is educated sun exposure, because the melanomas of today are not caused by today's sunbathing, but by our childhoods and early adolescence.
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.
