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

I would hate to live in the country, unless I was living on a farm.

Margaret Thatcher was in my year, and our first-year college photograph shows us standing side by side in the back row. We were both grammar school girls on state scholarships.

Ten thousand pounds is the legal value of a negligently taken life, of a child or a parent. A cold and somewhat mean-spirited calculation: you would do better if you slipped on a paving-stone and broke a front tooth.

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.

I was born in a small suburb of Ilford in a rather nasty housing estate that my mother despised. She had grown up in the country, so when the war came and I was evacuated to Wales she thought I was much better off there.

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.