Inspiration
In an interview with BBC News, Helen Fielding was inspired for this book by the way the world responded to the September 11 attacks. She once spent some time in the Sudan as a journalist and loved her time there. In light of the invasion of Iraq, Fielding wondered why they had not sent a female spy in to interview the perpetrator. She felt that women have an air of innocence around them that men lack. Olivia parallels James Bond in many ways and Fielding was very fond of Ian Fleming's novels.
Read more about this topic: Olivia Joules And The Overactive Imagination
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)