Joanna Trollope

"Oh I admire untidiness so much. Theres something in the emotional carelessness, the freedom of it, that I quietly applaud."

"[Asked "Why do you write?"] A combination of a desire to communicate, and a passionate belief in the power of story to build up relationships, to shape us. People-watching."

"[On the Aga saga tag being applied to her novels] Its so inaccurate [...] Actually, the novels are quite subversive, quite bleak. Its all rather patronising isnt it?"

"Im no lyrical stylist, you wouldnt pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldnt describe my novels as intellectual."

"For all that somebody gets dumped every nanosecond in the world, you dont want to be lumped in with everybody else – you want it to be expressed as poignantly and vividly as you feel it yourself [...] A cliche is only a cliche if its happening in someone elses life."

"Although it must be bloody annoying for a writer to have her work reduced to a flip phrase, I have only used it once and in a perfectly respectable context. What happened to the term after that is no more my responsibility than it would be Trollopes if her jokey reference to a certain kind of serious fiction as "grim lit" took hold."

"What Im trying to do in all these novels is mirror a contemporary preoccupation. Im not providing any solutions. Im simply saying: "Can we please get the conversation going?"

"I wanted to write a novel about the sandwich generation: parents falling to pieces at one end of your life and children being quite demanding at the other. You, the woman, are probably working full-time, but society, which is really very old-fashioned, still expects women to do all the caring."

"All the middle-class people I write about would have had nannies and servants in the past, but now we do everything ourselves and children absolutely dominate our lives. Its their demands, their homework, their nightmares, their insistence on staying down, because downstairs is more interesting than upstairs. I dont think children are particularly sweet, but I think theyre absolutely fascinating, and I take them as seriously as they take themselves. I dont think theyre dear little innocents in this never-never nursery land; I think theyre adults in the making, and they suffer great fears and anxieties and pains. And we give them silly food looking like fish and rabbits all cut up tiny, and dress them up in dolly clothes."

"In ordinary life [...] if were in love, we still have to go and see old aunts in nursing homes, take the children to school, and go to Tesco, and its that juggling act that the 19th-century novelists are jolly good at, but that we have lacked in fiction now for about a generation. [She has set out to] do the things the traditional novel has always done: to mirror reality, explore peoples emotional lives, but also to involve a great many other dilemmas. I think my books are just the dear old traditional novel making a quiet comeback."

"I was born into the Church of England, Im still in it, and I go to church. Its as natural to me as breathing - you know, Gods always been there, he will always be there. I dont talk about it elaborately, and I never will, because Im not that sort of Englishwoman: I mean, evangelism gives me the horrors."

"Ive done the countryside for decades. The last dog went to paradise in the summer, dear old boy. So its just me now. Even if Im miserable in London, Im happier miserable. You have to see the countryside on a grey afternoon to really understand what it means to live there. It can be quite alarming."