Lisa Jewell

My parents' marriage was, on an aesthetic level, very pleasing to behold.

I like the fact that my husband and I have been together for a long time and have a warm and colourful history together.

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

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.

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.

I always wanted to write psychological thrillers.

There's a weird contrast between my usual daily routine and then my book coming out. It's like someone's just suddenly opened the curtains in a dark room, and everyone's looking at you.

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?'

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.

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

My husband loves having his own room.

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 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.

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.

No man ever fell in love with me for the way I fill out a Lycra dress.

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 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.

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

My father was a self-employed textile agent, and the shop below his office was an art gallery.

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.

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

Getting married young was the worst experience of my life. It was horrible - really horrible.

The older I get, the more I love psychological thrillers.

I don't think my first book was chick lit.

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

My mother had breast cancer when she was 39.

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

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.

I think that not being proactive is a good thing. I like life to unfold on its own.

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

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.

'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.

The only way you can write about a happy family in a drama is to make them unhappy.

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.

My mother died in 2005. She was 61 years old.

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.

Everyone thinks they've got a book inside 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 take the six weeks of the school summer holidays off because I'm pretty sure I'm not going to look back on my life one day and say, 'Damn, I wish I hadn't spent so much time with my children.'

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

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?'

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

I never had one of those glorious young bodies that make older men and women weep. So I don't tend to look back with nostalgia or yearn for what I've lost. Because it was never all that.

'Ralph's Party' was supposed to be a psychological thriller, but I fell in love with all my characters and wanted only the best for them.

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

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

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.

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.

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 father, Anthony, was a textile agent who sold fabric in the West End and was away a lot. He was very glamorous. When he first met my mum, he swept her off into this big, social world.