I wanted to be a war reporter - scrabbling around, exposing things. I didn't want to go to university, I wanted to get a job, but Auntie Beryl said I should go to Oxford.

People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.

Children often have a much stronger concept of morality than adults.

But I don't write about sex for today's teenagers. Or Doc Martens boots either. I'm more interested in exploring how exactly the world is run, which doesn't really change that much from one generation to another.

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

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

I met my second husband on a bus. We looked at each other and that was it. We were both married to other people at the time and behaved badly, but we didn't seem to have any choice. We were very happy for nearly 50 years and would still be together if it wasn't for the bloody railways.