Jane Green

“Melanoma is not the most common of skin cancers, but it is the most dangerous if not found in the early stages.”

“I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What I've come to learn with self-publishing is that if you want to provide readers with something of equal quality, it requires the same amount of time and expense.”

“Having struggled with food issues and eating disorders myself, particularly when I was younger, I've long been interested in using it within my books.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously.”

“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.”

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

“My training as a journalist was invaluable: when I worked on 'The Daily Express,' the editor would often ask for 1000 words within a couple of hours. I could not say I was not inspired. I had to get on with it.”

“Taking a risk is always frightening, but I gave myself a set period of time and had enough money to see me through. I operated from the belief that things would be okay, that if I wasn't successful I would find myself a job, but either way, I would be fine.”

“I no longer think you can live without passion.”

“Marriage should be about fun. It's about friendship, and laughter, and trust, and fun.”