Writer Quotes

I met Richard Burton, an RAF cadet on a two-term course. I would have flirted more enthusiastically if it had not been for the horrid boils on the back of his neck.

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 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 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.

I hope in my books I help children to see their strengths, and show them I have some idea of what they may occasionally be going through. Especially at tricky moments when it is easier to go back and evade things rather than go forwards and confront them.

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.

I dislike the word 'victim.' I dislike being told that I 'lost' my husband - as if I had idly abandoned you by the side of the railway track like an unwanted pair of old shoes.

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.

At 11, I passed the scholarship - only just; I wasn't very good at maths - to Ilford County High for Girls. When the Second World War started we were evacuated, first of all to Ipswich, and then to Aberdare, Queen of the Valleys, in south Wales.

All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.

Adults get more confused by social worker jargon. Unlike children, they are also less likely to see two sides of an argument, and they no longer think they can make the world a better place. That can make them rather boring, I suppose.

I am not a victim. I am an angry survivor.

The dissolution of the Party - we will not let such a tremendous, big, and glorious party be so easily crashed: this would then be the moment, when we would begin to fight on all fronts.

A nation is a totality of men united through community of fate into a community of character.

In America, every female under fifty calls herself a girl.

To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.

Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.

Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.

Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.

Naturally, love's the most distant possibility.

The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.

Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else - an animal's incomplete compared to a person... and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary.

A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.