“I feel like they lifted more direct lines from the book than we’ve seen before,” the author tells PEOPLE of season 3 of the hit Netflix series

Julia Quinn might be the mastermind behind the beloved world of Bridgerton, but even she gets surprised by her own creativity sometimes.

While chatting to PEOPLE about the success of her backlist titles on Spotify Audiobooks – and the fact that listening to Bridgerton audiobooks has increased by 143% in the U.S. alone – the author shares some of her favorite scenes that have come to life on the screen in the Shondaland series.

“I love the mallet of death. That was one I always knew would translate very well,” Quinn says, referring to the season 2 tension between Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) and Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley) over which mallet they get for a game of pall mall.

“In season three, it was really fun. I feel like they lifted more direct lines from the book than we’ve seen before,” she reveals, referring to the most recent installment that told the friends-to-lovers story of Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) and Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton)

“Actually, it was funny, when I was reading the scripts, I would see things, because I don’t reread the books really, and I’d see something and be like, ‘I think I wrote that. Did I write that? Was that from me?’ Then I’d have to go into the manuscript and do a search, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I did write that. That’s really good.'”

Quinn continues, “There’s the line when she’s like, ‘Were you ever punished as a child?’ Then there’s another one where she was something like, ‘I could die without being kissed and it would kill me.’ And he’s like, ‘You’d already be dead.’ And I said, ‘I think I wrote that.’ It was very funny. I made my husband pause [the episode]. I was like, ‘Wait, I think I wrote that.'”

Quinn admits that the longevity of the series she began writing nearly a quarter-century ago feels “incredible.”

“These books, they never really died. They were always for sale. They never went out of print. It’s always been really my most popular series,” she explains. “It was never like it disappeared and came back. So for me, it’s always been there, but it definitely exploded in a new way [with the show].”

The series’ impressive performance on Spotify Audiobooks reaffirms that, too. “I think one of the great things about what the television series has done, and now what platforms like Spotify are doing, is bringing [the books] to fans who not just maybe haven’t heard of me as a writer, but really haven’t experienced a historical romance as a book.”

As the series continues to rank among Netflix’s most successful programs, Quinn says she’s happy that fans love both the books and the show in equal measure.

“People say, ‘Well, don’t you want everybody to think the book is better?’ And I said, ‘No, because I want the show to be great,'” she says. “I would be lurking on the internet, and about half the people would say the books are better, and half the people would say the show is better. I think that means we’re doing something right.”