I Would Hate To Live

All Writers Are Thieves; Theft Is A Necessary Tool Of The Trade.

I Was Cleaning Out The Pigsty At A Farm In Wales, Where My Mother Had Rented A Room, When The Results Of My Final School Exam Were Handed To Me By The Postman, Along With The News That I Had A State Scholarship To Oxford. I Had Waited For This Letter For So Many Weeks That I Had Abandoned Hope, Deciding That I Had Failed Ignominiously.

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.

I Grew Up On A Suburban Street With Lace Curtains And Dull Neighbours, So I Made Up Stories To Tell My Friend, In Which They Became Serial Killers And Burglars. She Told Her Mother, Who Then Told Mine.

The Kind Of Response I Hope For When I Write My Novels For Children: To Give Them A Chance To Recognize Something Of Their Own Feelings -- About Themselves, Their Parents, Their Friends -- And Their Own Situation As A Kind Of Subject Race, Always At The Mercy Of The Adults Who Mostly Run Their Lives For Them.