Quotes from 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.

For me, 'Bookends' marks the start of my foray into commercial fiction, away from what has always been thought of as more traditional chick lit - single girl in the city trips around in Manolos looking for Mr. Right.

My e-books sales have overtaken everything else, so I think all the marketing has become very much driven by the author now because of social media.

I love getting out the house because writing is such a solitary business that even being at the library makes me feel part of the world.

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

I have a deep and passionate love of America. It is where I have always thought I would be happiest, and although I miss England desperately, I find that my heart definitely has its home over here.

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!

The bad news is that my thin melanoma has something called mitosis, which means the cancer cells are dividing and multiplying even as I write. My thin melanoma has already spread outside of the tumor and into the deep layers of skin.

Twice a year, I take myself off to a self-imposed 'writer's retreat', staying at a small inn or on a friend's farm, where I am all alone and do nothing other than write.

I am very busy, life is very busy, and I was, I think, a somewhat lazy friend. I love them, I know they love me, but I didn't make much of an effort.

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.

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.

My favorite part of speaking at events has never been the speaking, but the reading of my books.

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.

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

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

In my small, coastal New England town, an hour outside New York, I know many people who have dealt with cancer. I can reel off the names of at least 15 women I know, all in their 40s.

When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American.

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.

Once the intimacy has gone, however well you may get on, however friendly you may become, it is hard to believe it was ever there.

Covers, so many covers, so many different, delectable pictures, and although, metaphorically speaking, it is the thing I hate most, when it comes to literature I always judge books by their covers. First the cover will catch my eye, then I read the back of the book, and then finally the first page.

And then there was him, the long and painful love of her life.

Everyone in that garden knew it was only a matter of time before he kissed her.

Alcohol made me beautiful in a way I never felt the rest of the time.