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

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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?' "

" 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. "

" If you feel that your father was lacking as a husband, it affects your own choice of man. "

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

" 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. "

" My mother had breast cancer when she was 39. "

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

" That whole idea of chick lit being a thing that you just lump all the commercial female writers into - it went on for years.I'd switch on the radio, and I'd hear, 'Two female authors are here to discuss chick lit - is it dead?' and I'd think, 'Argh, no, not again. Are we seriously still having this conversation?' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Writing a book is not easy. "

" When we were kids, we couldn't wait to have our own rooms, not to have to share anymore. And that is what I love about having my own bedroom. It is mine. My sleep is mine. Both pillows are mine. If I wake up, it is me who has woken me up... It makes me feel like a grown-up. I love it. "

" 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. "

" Flowers would be wasted on me. I don't like valentines. I don't need gifts. I'm a pragmatic romantic. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Everyone thinks they've got a book inside them. "

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

" It wasn't until I was 23 and got married to a guy who was really bookish that I got completely hooked on reading and writing again. He had so many paperbacks, I didn't have to buy a book for four and a half years. "

" I tried to write about my first marriage in a fictional version but got two pages into it and realised it was too personal. Then I came up with an old-fashioned love triangle, which became the plot for 'Ralph's Party.' "

" 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 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. "

" I am a terrible, terrible typist. I could not have been a writer in the age of typewriters. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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