I am not a victim. I am an angry survivor.

I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.

All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.

All writers are thieves; theft is a necessary tool of the trade.

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

A writer's work may be a coded autobiography, but only a very close friend could decipher it.

People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.

I met Richard Burton, an RAF cadet on a two-term course. I would have flirted more enthusiastically if it had not been for the horrid boils on the back of his neck.

I like stirring the pot - I think it's part of my duty, to shake people up a bit - make them look at things in a different way.

I dislike the word 'victim.' I dislike being told that I 'lost' my husband - as if I had idly abandoned you by the side of the railway track like an unwanted pair of old shoes.

I wanted to be a war reporter - scrabbling around, exposing things. I didn't want to go to university, I wanted to get a job, but Auntie Beryl said I should go to Oxford.

Your troubles, pressures, fears, and uncertainties will shoot you to greatness if only you trust in God.

In a world of limited resources, our wealth is at the expense of the poor. To put it simply, if we have it, others cannot.

How many things there are which I do not want.

Education is the art of helping young people to completeness; for the Christian, this means education is helping a young person to be more like Christ, the model of all Christians.

You can't turn the sheriff into a toad, Hannah. It's against the rules. --Abbey Drake

Not only does "orthodox" no longer mean being right, it practically means being wrong.

It's [Augusta National] a difficult course and it doesn't make it easier when you have three shanks.

I often laugh at Satan, and there is nothing that makes him so angry as when I attack him to his face, and tell him that through God I am more than a match for him

As long as she is wise and good, a girl has sufficient dowry.

Purely by hard work, one can become an artist.