All writers are thieves; theft is a necessary tool of the trade.

I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.

I am not a victim. I am an angry survivor.

All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

A writer's work may be a coded autobiography, but only a very close friend could decipher it.

People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.

I met Richard Burton, an RAF cadet on a two-term course. I would have flirted more enthusiastically if it had not been for the horrid boils on the back of his neck.

I like stirring the pot - I think it's part of my duty, to shake people up a bit - make them look at things in a different way.

I dislike the word 'victim.' I dislike being told that I 'lost' my husband - as if I had idly abandoned you by the side of the railway track like an unwanted pair of old shoes.

I wanted to be a war reporter - scrabbling around, exposing things. I didn't want to go to university, I wanted to get a job, but Auntie Beryl said I should go to Oxford.

I realized that the "thing" and the "concept" were substituted for feeling and understood the falsity of the world of will and idea

Writing isn't difficult. Writing well is difficult. What is most difficult is being with the interior experience that manifests as resistance to writing.

The troop whose captain is (apparently) not managing it, but whose girls manage themselves under the Scout laws, is the ideal troop.

All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces.

Don't blame yourself for the declines, because one day you will credit yourself for the increases.

When I fall in love, I don't know why I fall in love, I just know that I am in love.

Now I’m the go-to-girl for silent films.

The Holy Spirit's motivation is always the same thing -to charge the word with heaven's own electric power.

I make my mistakes in public.