Yes - I am usually overweight. I have had to be interested in diet because of being diabetic for 30 years and having kidney failure.

Will you lie to me and promise to read them? Books need to be read. The pages need to be turned.

Yes, I hate it when people call me a 'national treasure'. It takes away your bite and makes you feel like a harmless old golden Labrador.

Love is the only thing that keeps me sane.

I married two weeks after my 18th birthday, far too young, and by the time I was 23 I was a single mother of three small children, Sean, Daniel and Victoria, living in a prefab house.

Most social problems could be helped or prevented if people had more money and practical advice.

I don't know why women are so mad about flowers. Personally, they leave me cold. I prefer trees.

Every time I start a new piece of work, I spend a long while under the duvet thinking I can't do it.

There's only one thing more boring than listening to other people's dreams, and that's listening to their problems.

I think we take it for granted that if you are with your husband after 30 years, then he is the love of your life.

I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.

An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.

One has to grow up with good talk in order to form the habit of it.

... but one loves, and when one is on the brink of death, one turns around to look backward, and one says to oneself: "I have often suffered, I have sometimes been wrong, but I have loved.

The next-most difficult thing in the world is to get perspective. The most difficult is to keep it.

A horse doesn't know whether the rider on his back wears a dress or pants away from the track.

If we all climb together, we could climb the highest hill.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

Indistinctness is my forte.

If you go to a building to skate, or if you go to these places to skate, you're told it's against the law in some cities. It's definitely a bummer. It's unfortunate.

I never said I was an angel. Nor am I innocent or holy like the Virgin Mary. What I am is natural and serious and as sensitive as an open nerve on an ice cube.