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.

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.

This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you.

A good husband makes a good wife.

It's always been really important for me to try to maintain a balanced life, professional and personal, and this was absolutely something that my husband and I had hoped for.

I have finally become a husband and I am genuinely enjoying every moment of it.

My husband was actually very keen that I would become a Bond girl.

I must quit marrying men who feel inferior to me. Somewhere there must be a man who could be my husband and not feel inferior.

An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.

Nobody teaches you to be a father. Nobody teaches you to be a husband. Nobody teaches you how to be a star. You have to learn to work with the tools.

A true king is neither husband nor father; he considers his throne and nothing else.

Yes, I am seeking a husband. As soon as the right man asks me, I shall say, It is not good for a woman to live alone.

My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can't decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.

But, alas! what poor Woman is ever taught that she should have a higher Design than to get her a Husband?

Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.

I don't sit around thinking that I'd like to have another husband; only another man would make me think that way.

And I find it very easy to memorize the scripts, which are so close to conversations my husband and I have.

If a woman earned a dollar by scrubbing, her husband had a right to take the dollar and go and get drunk with it and beat her afterwards. It was his dollar.

I'm not resigning, and I'm going to try very hard to go back to work a better man and a better husband too.

Again, I shall be told that the law presumes the husband to be kind, affectionate, and ready to provide for and protect his wife. But what right, I ask, has the law to presume at all on the subject?

The best kind of kinky sex is to have kinky sex with your wife or husband, the person you love.

I know who I am as a person, as a father, and as a husband.

Donald, my husband, considers himself a feminist.