I think I'm brave because I've made decisions based - I hope not entirely selfishly - on what I think is right for me to do next.

I have great family and good friends; the stories I told became popular, and people all over the world bought them.

If I had my life to live all over again, I really think I would have been a fit person. Looking around me, I realise that the men and women who walked and ran and swam and played sport look better and feel better than the rest of us.

Nobody is ordinary if you know where to look.

All I ever wanted to do is to write stories that people will enjoy and feel at home with.

I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.

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.