Live with all of your senses.

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.

The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute.

One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.

Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.

The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.

Every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression a symbolic utterance... Everything is of the blood, of the senses.

I believe every chess player senses beauty, when he succeeds in creating situations, which contradict the expectations and the rules, and he succeeds in mastering this situation.

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression.

There is always a point when one senses one's lack of skill, the doubt.

Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.

We know that our senses are subject to decay, that from our middle years they are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if we didn't know and didn't believe.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.

Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity.

How good is man's life, the mere living! How fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.

Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?

Terrible is the fight put up by the senses. Fight bravely! Conquer them you must.

Of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful.

Nothing can be found in the intellect if previously has not been found in the senses.

For disorder obstructs: besides, it doth disgust life, distract the appetities, and yield no true relish to the senses.