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" If one of my romantic-comedy colleagues had written and directed 'Love Actually,' they would have been torn limb from limb. I thought it was awful, contrived, dreadful. I could see every twist and turn. I thought it was despicable. It was the writing that got me. "

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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. "

Lisa Jewell

You

Husband

Live

" For me, the optimum circumstances for writing a book are those of stultifying routine. "

Lisa Jewell

Writing

Book

" I married someone I didn't love. I was too polite to say no. "

" My mother was born on February 8, 1944, in Lucknow, India. Her father, Albert, was half-Indian and half-Portuguese. "

" Don't do a hard sell or try to tell the agent that you're going to be a bestseller or the next John Grisham. This goes down very badly. If your work is good, then they are skilled enough to know this within a few pages. "

" 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 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. "

" All my main characters have got bits of me, bits of my family, bits of my friends. "

Lisa Jewell

Got

Characters

" I always wanted to write psychological thrillers. "

" Sometimes you need to be shaken out of a situation. "

" You feel undervalued when you write the kind of fiction I write. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I knew I wasn't the sort of person who could do a full-time job and write in the evening and at weekends. "

" Writing a book is not easy. "

" I must always, always have a box of Extra chewing gum in my bag because I have developed a terrible cheek-chewing compulsion. It's not only uncomfortable, but I look really weird when I'm doing it, and chewing gum is the only way I can stop myself. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Lisa Jewell

Think

People

" 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 look about my house and see there are lots of lovely things in it, but I constantly buy more. "

" 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?' "

Lisa Jewell

Different

Last

" If you have a calling, you need to let it find you. "

" 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. "

" My husband loves having his own room. "

" Every brilliant book I read is an influence and an inspiration. As is every brilliant movie I watch and every brilliant box set. "

" Ever since 'Single White Female,' the 1990 novel which was turned into a supremely scary film, the idea of a seemingly normal woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants has become an abiding literary trope. "

" In 1995, I was 27, and I completely got caught up in Blur and Oasis and the fashion of the time. "

" 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. "