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

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.

Whereas Schaeffer and Henry were working like samplers, their idea was to capture those sounds which couldn't be serially calibrated because they were too complex in character.

My mum took me to the ballet at three, and that was the only time I sat still, with jaw open, mesmerised. She brought me home, and I wouldn't stop dancing.

I've had an interest in politics since I was a little kid.

All oppression creates a state of war.

But, yeah, I'd love to do something else in someone else's movie.

White male privilege remains alive in America, but the phrase would seem odd, if not infuriating, to a sixty-year-old man working as a Walmart greeter in southern Ohio.

I once threw myself a surprise party on Twitter because I was lonely. It was awesome. Thousands of people showed up and then Wil Wheaton and I made a bunch of monkey-ponies. It was the most successful surprise party I've ever thrown in my life. It was also the only surprise party I've ever thrown in my whole life.

In a global race, can we really justify the huge number of expensive peripheral European institutions? Can we justify a commission that gets ever larger? Can we carry on with an organisation that has a multibillion pound budget but not enough focus on controlling spending and shutting down programmes that haven't worked?

Israel has the power to protect itself and its citizens.

My great concern is not whether you have failed but whether you are content with your failure.

Trifles render us miserable, but trifles also console us.

I stay up nights and fiddle with my opera designs. It's a bit obsessive. That's why I can't do it all the time.

Packing lunches and going over menus is a great way to make small changes in the way your kids eat.

Although I was entirely relaxed on camera, if I had to stand up and say something to an assembled group of people, I was rendered all but inarticulate.

Ignorance is not bliss, but in my case, that was.

Coming out is a means of redefining oneself, of claiming membership in a lifestyle and a social order with distinct values. Chief among these values is honesty.

Consumers are freeing up an enormous amount of time that they were spending with stereotypical old media, and clearly, that time is going primarily two places: videogames and online.

I just like playing with makeup and clothes...so I really don't feel like there are rules, and if there are rules, then I think it's up to you to break them.

Truth is what works.