You never know people, do you? You can work with 'em for twenty years; you don't know 'em at all.

The business of life is learning that you can't lay down the terms.

My parents came from different backgrounds. My father's was grander than my mother's, so my mother had... to put up with the disapproval of my father's relations.

I don't think I'm an unkind person, I don't think my books are unkind, and I don't think my readers are unkind.

If there's one thing I don't look for in a maid, it's discretion. Except with my own secrets, of course.

My childhood was a happy one, spent in a tall house in South Kensington and later in East Sussex, but my early and mid teens were less successful.

My own belief is that most people are trying to do their best. It doesn't mean they have no nasty side, or that they don't have a bad temper, or that they have never done anything they feel ashamed of. But fiction operates on people waking up trying to be horrible, and I don't think most people are trying to be horrible.