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:
“For a painter, the Mecca of the world, for study, for inspiration and for living is here on this star called Paris. Just look at it, no wonder so many artists have come here and called it home. Brother, if you can’t paint in Paris, you’d better give up and marry the boss’s daughter.”
—Alan Jay Lerner (1918–1986)
“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)
“Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)