Literary Birthday – 26 August – Paula Hawkins

Nine Quotes

1. I find writing the darker side, writing tragedy, a lot easier than writing happiness. Happiness is just less psychologically compelling, isn’t it?
2. I’m not naturally an extrovert. I’m a writer – I sit in a room by myself making things up. That is where I’m happiest.
3. Certainly, there is a tendency to lump women who write similar types of books together, and it’s not just in crime, is it? Women’s fiction is supposedly a whole genre of itself. There’s no male equivalent.
4. There’s nothing so painful, so corrosive, as suspicion.
5. My idea of fun is to sit looking at a blank wall in a cottage, making up stories in utter silence. The thought of going back to work in an office is horrendous.
6. I am interested in the ordinary sort of threat. I know that people are interested in things like serial killers and what have you, but actually, those aren’t the sort of crimes that really happen very much. The sort of crimes that happen tend to be more of a domestic nature and quite banal, but the psychology behind them is always fascinating.
7. I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.
8. I grew up in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and I moved to London when I was 17. And I started commuting to go to college. And I used to really enjoy that part of my journey where the – it was actually a Tube train, but it was over ground, and it went right past the backs of people’s houses, and I could actually see right in.
9. The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.

Paula Hawkins is a Zimbabwe-born author who grew up in Southern Africa and who now lives in London. She worked as a journalist for 15 years before turning her hand to fiction. She is best known for her 2015 novel The Girl on the Train. Her latest book is Into the Water.

Image: Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paula_Hawkins_G%C3%B6teborg_Book_Fair_2015.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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