Lisa Jewell Quotes
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My mother had breast cancer when she was 39.
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My mother was born on February 8, 1944, in Lucknow, India. Her father, Albert, was half-Indian and half-Portuguese.
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I am the oldest of three girls and the only one not named after one of my father's ex-girlfriends.
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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.
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Every time I've written a book, I'm like, 'Oh, it's so different from the last one. Are they going to like it?'
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My mother died in 2005. She was 61 years old.
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I think that not being proactive is a good thing. I like life to unfold on its own.
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For a very long time, I thought everyone I met through the process of getting an agent and a publishing deal had made a mistake. When they agreed to pay me for the book, I thought they would ask me for the money back.
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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.
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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.
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I always wanted to write psychological thrillers.
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Writing a book is not easy.
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People with big ideas worry. They lie awake at night and fret as they try to climb up the social or financial ladder. They probably feel proud of themselves for what they've achieved, but I'm proud of the fact that I've done very little - and hence have little to worry about - and I've still got somewhere.
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I married someone I didn't love. I was too polite to say no.
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You feel undervalued when you write the kind of fiction I write.
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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.
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The older I get, the more I love psychological thrillers.
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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.
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I am a terrible, terrible typist. I could not have been a writer in the age of typewriters.
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When I was a little girl, I was a real, drippy bookworm. But when I went into fashion, I stopped reading.
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'Ralph's Party' was a romantic comedy, and at the end of it, the two main characters, Ralph and Jen, kiss for the first time and think they're going to be happy together. Then, 10 years later, I wrote a sequel in which they've been together for 10 years and are about to split up.
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People say 'chick lit,' and what they mean is 'crap.' And so even though you might sell 100,000 copies of a book, you're never going to win a prize. These are books that people don't just read, they devour them - they stay up into the early hours because they want to devour them.
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I was brought up in the same house I was born in, and I lived there until I left home as an adult. I also went to a Catholic school, which was full of Irish girls whose parents never split up, so everyone I knew had these big family set-ups.
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Publishers have published women's fiction into a corner, and now we are all trying to punch our way out of it. We just have to write the best books we possibly can and hope that, once the pink covers and Bridget Jones have faded from memory, we might finally be allowed just to be called writers.