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

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 hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.

I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.

Please do not ask me to talk about my divorce. Mr. Ziegfeld and I are such very good friends. It is only a little matter quite between ourselves.

Divorce is the psychological equivalent of a triple coronary bypass.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

There's nothing like a family crisis, especially a divorce, to force a person to re-evaluate his life.

Anybody who's been through a divorce will tell you that at one point. they've thought murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn't that major.

I'm not saying that people should not divorce, but at the rate at which it happens here is sick. The kids, they suffer. I don't care what anyone says.

With The Key, it was, I had gone through a divorce and losing my father, and just kinda really reminiscing about how much I loved the traditional side of country music, so I made a record that was really traditional from start to finish.

Sometimes divorce is better than marriage.

To get over my divorce, I got a prescription to live at the Playboy Mansion for a while.

The day I initiated divorce proceedings against Michael Farmer, I was ready to retire to a desert cave and rethink my life.

Peace, of course, is different from divorce; indeed, in essential respects, divorce is the opposite of peace.

My parent's divorce and hard times at school, all those things combined to mold me, to make me grow up quicker. And it gave me the drive to pursue my dreams that I wouldn't necessarily have had otherwise.

As soon as she gets her divorce one of us is going to marry her. We don't know which. She is about as beautiful a woman as I ever saw, and very witty and well-informed, but it would cost a good deal to keep her in diamonds.

I believe I went through a divorce. My relationship with Ellen is no less significant as a marriage than my relationship to Coley.

The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population.

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.