Joanna Trollope quotes

You can change yourself and you can change the situation but you absolutely cannot change other people. Only they can do that. (Joanna Trollope)

You can't love a library of e-books. You can't furnish a room with e-books.

Joanna Trollope

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

Joanna Trollope

I'm no lyrical stylist, you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as intellectual.

Joanna Trollope

Oddly my name has been no professional help at all! It seems to have made no difference. I admire him hugely, both for his benevolence and his enormous psychological perception.

Joanna Trollope

I always love writing about children.

Joanna Trollope

I am often criticised for being rather accessible.

Joanna Trollope

I am not a fan of the cupcake image. This idea that you can distract a girl with something frivolous like a cake or shoes or handbags, and she won't be a threat to men.

Joanna Trollope

My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are of equal importance.

Joanna Trollope

I don't always set stories in villages, more often in towns. But always in smallish communities because the characters' actions are more visible there, and the dramatic tension is heightened.

Joanna Trollope

You can't be too old to be a writer, but you can definitely be too young! (Joanna Trollope)

My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

Joanna Trollope

I'm actually rather orderly, although the way that I write is not.

Joanna Trollope

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. But also being aware of situations that are currently preoccupying people. Codes of conduct change, but what the human heart wants really doesn't.

Joanna Trollope

For all that somebody gets dumped every nanosecond in the world, you don't 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 it's happening in someone else's life.

Joanna Trollope

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.

Joanna Trollope

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

Joanna Trollope

I've experienced huge kindness here, a great welcome and some very generous reviews without the snide social edge I often suffer from at home. I'm not patronized here either, which I much appreciate!

Joanna Trollope

You can't help parts of yourself leaking into other characters.

Joanna Trollope

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

Joanna Trollope