I have been lucky enough to travel a lot, meet great people in many lands. I have liked almost everyone I met along the way.

My memory of my home was that it was very happy, and that there was more fun and life there than there was anywhere else.

I've had a good life, full of more success and happiness than I ever expected.

If you don't go to a dance you can never be rejected but you'll never get to dance either.

I'm an escapist kind of writer.

An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.

You can't lay down laws for what people think and hope.