Quotes from Penny Jordan

Writing for Mills and Boon taught me a lot of discipline. You have to produce books in a short time scale and four a year, and it teaches you a lot.

There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer, and one of them is, 'But why?' The question that takes the book forward is, 'What if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?'

A thoughtful cup of tea brought to your bedside each morning means more to me than the huge bouquet of flowers bought once a year.

I was always a keen reader. I jotted down one or two things, but it never occurred to me to think of a job in writing. I thought that writers were like demi-gods. I don't know what I thought.

I chose to write the kind of romance I love best - one with a sheikh hero.

I was too ashamed and afraid to confide in friends, and wanted to convince others and myself that my marriage was a success. I lost myself in my writing. Finding ways for my characters to overcome their problems and make their relationships work helped plaster over the wound caused by my inability to make things right at home.

What I like writing about are people's relationships, not necessarily great big dramatic things but the smaller things in life and how they affect characters and challenge and change the people that they are. I do like a happy ending, so my books have to have a happy ending.

It's not very glamorous. People certainly wouldn't think so if they saw me sitting in my woolly socks at the kitchen table. Many times I sit at the typewriter and think, 'Why am I doing this?'

The appeal of romance is love. And that's universal.

I was still an avid reader of Mills & Boon romances - on publication day, I used to rush out of work to get to the local book store to grab my favourites before they all disappeared.

Only the weak blame their past for the faults they find in their present; the strong acknowledge the effects of their past and then move on from it. We are all free to choose whether we will be weak or strong.

All you have to do is circulate and listen. If you know what they're talking about, join in. If you don't know what they're talking about, then ask questions,' he relayed as if it was really that simple. 'People don't mind being asked questions. In fact, they like to show off their knowledge. What they don't like is someone pretending to know what they're talking about when they don't.

It was her nature...her weakness, that for her loving another human being must always have this intensity...this absoluteness.

You are as timid as the gazelle that grazes by the oases," he mocked softly. "Your eyes are those of a timid, hunted creature. Where is your bravery now, daughter of Hassan? Am I not only a man - only flesh and flesh and blood, whose heart beats even as yours does. Can't you feel it beneath your fingers?

For other women that kind of intimacy—the physical, mental and emotional closeness to a man, a lover—was something they took for granted. But she would never travel through life with a man she loved and who loved her in return. Out of nowhere, a yearning ache of loss welled up inside her. A sense of barren hopelessness that panicked and angered her.

your absence, but with my cousin in such very poor health still, I feel I cannot leave her, so…' The old

Freedom is a state of mind, mignonne,' he said against her hair. 'My ancestor found it in this room, studying the constellations, even though physically he was a prisoner of his own infirmity. Other men are prisoners of their own emotions, their hearts given in bondage to a woman as cold and remote as the distant stars.

Beware! In every man there lurks the falcon; a streak of ruthlessness and thirst for power.

At last you realise that a man is not an equal, but an alien force, bent on destruction when he is aroused to anger.

Our strong sun darkens the colour of your skin to the colour of ours, but it cannot change what lies underneath.

to his mother's overprotective concern for him. Normally she would have dismissed him without a thought, but

What you are, all that you are, shows in everything about you—your honesty, your compassion, your courage, your intelligence, and most of all your love.

A sated velvet bee tottered drunkenly out of the flowerbeds, humming lazily as it buzzed off into the blue beyond. She

Children were vulnerable—helpless hostages to fate, their emotions so tender that a parent could with the smallest sentence, the briefest gesture, accidentally scar them. He did not want the burden of carrying that responsibility.