Gail Honeyman

“I had been thinking about social awkwardness and about people you meet who are not bad people - there is nothing wrong with them, but they are just a little bit awkward, and it makes you feel uncomfortable, and it makes you want to bring the encounter to an end. I thought, 'Is there a reason for that? What has contributed to their demeanour?'”

“I know some writers are meticulous planners, but I'm not one of them.”

“It's helpful to get feedback on your work, and I think you learn a lot from reading other people's work and giving them feedback.”

“It’s SpongeBob, Eleanor,” he said, speaking very slowly and clearly as though I were some sort of idiot. “SpongeBob SquarePants?” A semi-human bath sponge with protruding front teeth! On sale as if it were something completely unremarkable! For my entire life, people have said that I’m strange, but really, when I see things like this, I realize that I’m actually relatively normal.”

“'Eleanor' was so much fun to write, because there's a brutal honesty about her. She's got no filters and no concept of social norms.”

“I'd make a terrible casting director.”

“My eye was drawn to a bright green hue, the same shade as a poisonous Amazonian frog, the tiny, delightfully deadly ones.”

“I wanted to write about the transformative power of small acts of kindness. An old man falls in the street, you stop and make sure he's OK. Or even smaller acts than that, though - buying someone a cup of coffee, telling them their hair looks nice - sometimes you don't realise the transformative effect on people. I wanted to celebrate that.”

“The workplace can be a good place to find opportunities to socialise, but what if you don't meet any like-minded people there, or what if you work alone? Is it, somewhat counter-intuitively, easier to find yourself lonely in a city than in a small town or village?”

“I pondered what else I should take for him. Flowers seemed wrong; they're a love token, after all. I looked in the fridge, and popped a packet of cheese slices into the bag. All men like cheese.”

“I was hurtling towards 40, and I'd always wanted to write. It does focus your mind, heading towards that big birthday. If there is anything you think you want to do, you think, 'I probably should have a go now!'”

“Eleanor Oliphant isn't me or anyone I know. Of course I've felt loneliness - everybody does - but Eleanor and her experiences are fictional.”

“I started doing a Ph.D., and then I thought, 'I don't really want to spend all this time on my own in the library.'”

“If you start a new career at 40, you've still got another 35 years to go.”

“I wanted to show platonic friendship between men and women, because I think it is underutilised in fiction.”

“If someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn't spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.”

“I don't listen to music when I write. If I do, I usually end up giving it my whole attention, which means, unfortunately, I don't get much work done!”

“When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.”

“The gilded confines of the Beauty Hall were not my preferred habitat; like the chicken that had laid the eggs for my sandwich, I was more of a free-range creature.”

“Loneliness is a huge issue for both individuals and for society. It's taken a long time for the issue to be treated seriously and for us to begin to understand the impact it can have.”