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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.

— Joanna Trollope

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More quotes by Joanna Trollope

[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.

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

Interview in The Guardian (2006)

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

Interview in The Guardian (2006)

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.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Joanna Trollope (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.