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.

Jane Green

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

Jane Green

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

Jane Green

I believe it is the flaws that make us interesting, our backgrounds, the hardships.

Jane Green

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.

Jane Green

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

Jane Green

I spent the first summer after my diagnosis creeping about in giant sun hats and tents, cursing the sun, staying inside as much as possible. Now I am beginning to think the most important thing is educated sun exposure, because the melanomas of today are not caused by today's sunbathing, but by our childhoods and early adolescence.

Jane Green

For me, decorating perfection means eclectic styles and collections of beautiful things like pottery, pillboxes and match strikers.

Jane Green

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.

Jane Green

I am often asked what I would be doing if I hadn't become a writer. I have long said I would probably be a chef or a garden designer or a decorator, but since recording my own books, there is no doubt in my mind that if the writing doesn't work out, voice work is what I would choose.

Jane Green

Just as there are moments when the words flow and it feels like the easiest job in the world, there are many more when I think I have nothing to say, and my journalism training taught me that writing is a job, that you write whether you are inspired or not, and that the only way to unlock creativity is to write through it.

Jane Green

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.

Jane Green

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.

Jane Green

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.

Jane Green

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.

Jane Green

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.

Jane Green

Sadly, I don't think books ever sell based on your name alone - the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong!

Jane Green

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.

Jane Green

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

Jane Green

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

Jane Green

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.

Jane Green