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

Live with all of your senses.

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

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.

The monarchy is finished. It was finished a while ago, but they're still making the corpses dance.

'The Gambler' by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.

Being poor with three small children is terrifying. You can't make any plans. You know you're not going on holiday, ever. There's no way you could ever afford driving lessons or a car. And the guilt I used to feel: they had holes in their shoes, and at one point, I had to send them to school wearing Wellingtons when the sun was shining.

I always have this image of a woman running across a desert carrying children, trying to find water and food, not knowing when they'll get that. And her feet are slashed up from the dry, hard earth... Even when I'm uncomfortable, sometimes in pain, or just cold... I think, 'Thank God for what I've got.'

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.

I am surrounded by counselors. My sister is a counselor. My daughter is training to be a counselor. A lot of my friends are counselors.

I am the world's worst diabetic.

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.

I never imagined when I began writing in the early 1960s I'd become professional and my life would be transformed.

I prefer to keep my secrets to myself, to the grave... and beyond!

I take life very seriously. I can laugh at it, because what else can you do? But it's a hard daily battle.

I took my sight and mobility for granted.

I'd love a day devoid of responsibilities. I've often thought about going to a hotel just to have a day away from everything.

I'm getting to the end of my magnifying glasses now. One eye's gone completely. The other is gradually dimming. Dimming - that sounds very dramatic, doesn't it? I'm so lucky. I can still make a living - and the same kind of living.

I'm spectacularly disorganised. I wrote my latest book in seven different notebooks scattered throughout my house.

My second husband encouraged me to go to a writing group at our local theatre. It was my 'coming out of the closet' moment.

Sometimes I rant, in a comical way, about how the gods give with one hand and take with the other.

Watching 'The Jeremy Kyle Show' is my guilty pleasure.

We had library books in our house, but not our own. So you had 14 days to read them. There would be eight books a fortnight in our house and I'd read as many of those as I could.

When I was a child, I dreaded blindness. We used to ask: 'Would we rather be blind or deaf?' I said I'd rather be blind, even though I was scared of it. I couldn't bear not being able to hear music or talk to people.

When all my kids were at home, I used to write from midnight onwards.

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

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.

The monarchy is finished. It was finished a while ago, but they're still making the corpses dance.

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.

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.

I'm thinking of going to programming school. Learn how to sit down at any computer and learn to do anything on it. That's all I have left and have interest in.

I am aware of changes gradually taking place in my own designs as part of my thinking on this matter.

I'm against fashionable thinking.

I started thinking about my relationship with my students; I'm this guy who comes in from book - and movie - land and descends on angel wings into their classroom.

Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious.

I don't know, I think, in times where I'm really nervous, and I'm really under the pressure the worst possible outcome is for me to start thinking about it.

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.

In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough.

Conservatism has had from its inception vigorously positive, intellectually rigorous agenda and thinking. That agenda should have in my three pillars: strengthen the economy, strengthen our security, and strengthen our families.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

All of this got me thinking about the history of the westward expansion, and got me to wondering how the exploration of the Solar System would be changed if there were an indigenous presence out there.

Romance, like the rabbit at the dog track, is the elusive, fake, and never attained reward which, for the benefit and amusement of our masters, keeps us running and thinking in safe circles.

We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.

Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his work showed is that when the answers are simple too, then you can hear God thinking.

It is, therefore, essential that we guard our own thinking and not be among those who cry out against prejudices applicable to themselves, while busy spawning intolerances for others.

I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.

Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.

I went backwards and forwards over it until I was 22. And then in the past few years I began to say to myself, OK, look, I'm not messing around. This is something I want to attack, instead of thinking, I'll just see what happens with it.