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 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.

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

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.

You will manage to keep a woman in love with you, only for as long as you can keep her in love with the person she becomes when she is with you.

One of them says, 'Why did they do it?'And the other answers, 'Because they could.'That is the only answer there ever is.

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

A harp can be a dangerous as a sword, in the right hands.

My heart is your home.

Stripe felt frozen. To be so high and not high at all!It only looked good from the bottom.

I didn't really like modeling; it was fun but I always wanted acting.

Brisk Confidence still best with woman copes: Pique her and soothe in turn-soon Passion crowns thy hopes.

I'm not creating an enigma or leaving mystery, I'm just respecting myself enough as an artist to give myself room to grow and not to be devoured all in one go.

You should not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst.