Joanna Trollope

"The comparison to Jane Austen makes me fidget. There is a huge gulf between being great and being good. I know exactly which category I fall into and which she falls into. They are not the same. On a good day, I might be good."

"[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."

"In ordinary life [...] if we're in love, we still have to go and see old aunts in nursing homes, take the children to school, and go to Tesco, and it's 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 people's 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, I'm still in it, and I go to church. It's as natural to me as breathing - you know, God's always been there, he will always be there. I don't talk about it elaborately, and I never will, because I'm not that sort of Englishwoman: I mean, evangelism gives me the horrors."

"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. It's their demands, their homework, their nightmares, their insistence on staying down, because downstairs is more interesting than upstairs. I don't think children are particularly sweet, but I think they're absolutely fascinating, and I take them as seriously as they take themselves. I don't think they're dear little innocents in this never-never nursery land; I think they're 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."

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

"[On the Aga saga tag being applied to her novels] It's so inaccurate [...] Actually, the novels are quite subversive, quite bleak. It's all rather patronising isn't it?"

"I've done the countryside for decades. The last dog went to paradise in the summer, dear old boy. So it's just me now. Even if I'm miserable in London, I'm 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."

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

"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?""

"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."

"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."

"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 Trollope's if her jokey reference to a certain kind of serious fiction as "grim lit" took hold."