I have a garden, and I'm passionately interested in young people.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

It seemed sensible to move to a market town where I could walk everywhere.

A lot of people stop short. They don't actually die but they say, 'Right I'm old, and I'm going to retire,' and then they dwindle into nothing. They go off to Florida and become jolly boring.

I have deliberately left Sylvester and Julia's appearances to the reader's imagination.

I was sent to a finishing school, which didn't last long when mother found out how badly chaperoned we were. Then I 'came out' before going to a domestic science school.

Women's courage is rather different from men's. The fact that women have to bring up children and look after husbands makes them braver at facing long-term issues, such as illness. Men are more immediately courageous. Lots of people are brave in battle.

Each marriage has to be judged separately, and we never know what's going on in another person's marriage.

My father was a soldier and my mother was a great mover. She once counted up how many places she had lived in during the first 25 years of her marriage and it came to 20.

Looking back, I understand that I was teaching myself to write.

In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.

Of course risk-taking does not always pay off, but it's a lot of fun!

Twenty years ago, I was living in a lovely cottage on the edge of Dartmoor but I couldn't afford to run a car.

My first husband would never make up his mind in less than five years, so I used to get him to think that whatever course of action needed to be taken was his idea. Then he'd go right ahead.

We all lie to each other, present some sort of front.

Unimaginative people are spared quite a lot. They're often much happier, because they don't go through all the variety of conceptions of the person they love.

They may turn out to be a great disappointment, or perhaps they may be full of enchanting surprises.

That image of the countryside being a threatening place still exists. People continue to resist the challenge of learning about aspects of life they don't understand.

I always read that men don't like intelligent girls, but I've always found the reverse.

People try much less hard to make a marriage work than they used to fifty years ago. Divorce is easier.

Imagination which comes into play in falling in love is different from any other. Certainly in my case, and I've fallen in love all my life, one imagines the person to be as you want them to be. They frequently turn out to be someone different, for better or worse.

It was pretty awful for us children because we never really knew the local children. Mother was keen for us to learn languages, so our travels took us to France and Italy, as well as the West Country.

I have a garden, and I'm passionately interested in young people.

I found out only recently that we were making an index of enemy code signs.

Rebecca is an example of how not to manage men. The rules of the game never change, it requires subtlety.

You know what it's like to persuade a pigheaded child to do something they don't want to. If they hear the same suggestion from someone else, they'll go right off and do it.

I never really know the title of a book until it's finished.

I remember the evacuee children from towns and cities throwing stones at the farm animals. When we explained that if you did that you wouldn't have any milk, meat or eggs, they soon learned to respect the animals.

I don't write for any particular kind of person.

Writing Part of the Scenery has been a very different experience. I have been reminded of people and events, real and imaginary which have been part of my life. This book is a celebration of the land which means so much to me.

I want to thank all the fans for their support over the years. Keep supporting the Knicks, we're moving in the right direction here and we will be exciting to watch and competing against the best in the NBA. Come back to the Garden for those exciting games.

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.

Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that.

Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the garden of France - that spot where, amid verdant plains watered by wide streams, one inhales the purest air of heaven?

So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf, to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. 'What! no soap?' So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber.

If there is to be any hope of prosperity for this country it is by reversing that policy which made us simply the kitchen garden for supplying the British with cheap food.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.

God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul.

I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, 'Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.'

A garden is to be a world unto itself, it had better make room for the darker shades of feeling as well as the sunny ones.

Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.

To dwell is to garden.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

Little Sparta is a garden in the traditional sense. It is perhaps not like other modern gardens, but I think that other times would have had no difficulty with it.

Mostly, I spend my time being a mother to my two children, working in my organic garden, raising masses of sweet peas, being passionately involved in conservation, recycling and solar energy.

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.