As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.

[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!

It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.