Top 50 Jane Green Quotes

My e-books sales have overtaken everything else, so I think all the marketing has become very much driven by the author now because of social media.

I have been incredibly lucky with my novels but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would be interested in a cookbook. So I started to think about self-publishing.

The bad news is that my thin melanoma has something called mitosis, which means the cancer cells are dividing and multiplying even as I write. My thin melanoma has already spread outside of the tumor and into the deep layers of skin.

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.

As a child, growing up in Hampstead, North London, I was shockingly fair-skinned. Holidays involved me spending the second and third day face-down on a bed, shrieking should anyone touch my blistered skin.

Chick lit was amazing, and I was thrilled to be part of it.

I have only ever been to Antigua to hop over to other Caribbean islands. The airport had always seemed perfectly lovely, but I’m a quiet sort of holiday girl, and Antigua always seemed big.

I’d like to think I’m not quite so pretentious as to think my characters go off and live their lives once I’ve written the final page and switched the computer off.

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.

My favorite part of speaking at events has never been the speaking, but the reading of my books.

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 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 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 don’t listen to anything when I’m writing. I need total quiet, which is astounding, given that I spent years working for a newspaper and having to write features surrounded by ringing phones and people shouting.

I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel.

Ten years ago, you wrote a book and you never expected to find out anything about the author. Now with social media, everyone wants that connection. I think our readers want to be invited into our lives and brought on the journey and be part of this whole process.

My husband has a cousin who discovered, in his fifties, that the man he thought was his father was actually not, and that he had not only a father he had never met, but brothers.

The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill.

As a teenager, you are still entirely wrapped up in yourself.

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 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.

What I want in a good beach read is sunshine, drama, easy-reading and transportation to another world and other people’s problems.

My teens and 20s were spent lying on sheets of tinfoil in the weak English sun, covered in baby oil. In Greece and France I would burn, then turn a dark brown.

I am not someone who’s very good at looking after herself, and I am also not someone who goes on holiday very often.

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.

When I was a student, I had a part time job as a barmaid at a dodgy pub in Kent.

I am divorced, and one of the things I am tremendously grateful for is that my ex-husband and I made a decision to go through mediation. I knew a trial would drag on for years, would cost me everything, but worse, would be devastating for our four small children.

I have spent many a night in an Internet chat room, but not since I’ve been married.

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.

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 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.

In ‘Straight Talking,’ I had bared my soul, and the press attention had been overwhelming. There were times when I felt scared and vulnerable, regretting the articles I had written to publicize the book, regretting I had opened my life up for all to see.

Writing is a muscle that needs to be exercised every day: The more you write, the easier it becomes.

I treated the first few books as a very long journalistic exercise. I thought of every chapter as an article that needed to be finished.

I am Superwoman. I am the author of 15 novels, including one about cancer. I am not, however, someone who ‘gets’ cancer. I am a sun worshipper who never thought it could happen to me.

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.

I do know that I have always been one of life’s observers, always standing slightly on the outside, watching.

I have a gorgeous office at home but tend not to write there because there are so many distractions.

I have a theory that you can tell what the head of a company is like by the people who work there. I knew a publishing house that was run on fear and paranoia, and I felt sorry for everyone who worked there. Needless to say, the person at the helm was not known for kindness, warmth, or grace.

I have long been fascinated by our inclination to assume others we meet have the same moral code, similar values, and yet we can never be sure.

I learned that saying you love your friends isn’t enough: that love is a verb – it requires Acts of Love. It is all about the doing, not the saying, and now I make a point, every day, of emailing or phoning or making a plan with those I love.

I write in the mornings once the kids have gone to school, taking my laptop and a coffee to a little writer’s room in town where I plant noise-cancelling headphones on my head and get to work.

I consider myself pretty fearless, but the one thing I have always been frightened of is cancer.

I wanted to write stories I wanted to read, that I and my friends related to.

I think perhaps we all cook to feed some kind of hunger in ourselves. I am nourished by being surrounded by family and friends, by creating something delicious for them, by nurturing them.

In my small, coastal New England town, an hour outside New York, I know many people who have dealt with cancer. I can reel off the names of at least 15 women I know, all in their 40s.

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.

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.

I think friendship is more important than love, but that love that grows out of friendship is the very best of all.

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.