I have decided to be a poet. My father said there isn't a suitable career structure for poets and no pensions and other boring things, but I am quite decided.

Barry Kent's father looks like a big ape and has got more hair on the back of his hands than my father has got on his entire head.

My skin is dead good. I think it must be a combination of being in love and Lucozade.

Yes - I am usually overweight. I have had to be interested in diet because of being diabetic for 30 years and having kidney failure.

Most social problems could be helped or prevented if people had more money and practical advice.

I never imagined when I began writing in the early 1960s I'd become professional and my life would be transformed.

I married two weeks after my 18th birthday, far too young, and by the time I was 23 I was a single mother of three small children, Sean, Daniel and Victoria, living in a prefab house.