Live with all of your senses.

I am the world's worst diabetic.

I took my sight and mobility for granted.

Love is the only thing that keeps me sane.

Watching 'The Jeremy Kyle Show' is my guilty pleasure.

I prefer to keep my secrets to myself, to the grave... and beyond!

I seem to be able to get depressed quite easily without any reason.

I used to think I had nice arms, but I don't even think that anymore.

When all my kids were at home, I used to write from midnight onwards.

She liked people. Me, I can take them or leave them, but mostly leave them.

I've always been fascinated by totalitarian regimes. I'm not an admirer of them.

I must have been a very strange child. I was very pretentious. Like Adrian Mole.

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

My cream and black Aga. It is the heart of the house, and people congregate around it.

Will you lie to me and promise to read them? Books need to be read. The pages need to be turned.

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

I don't know why women are so mad about flowers. Personally, they leave me cold. I prefer trees.

The monarchy is finished. It was finished a while ago, but they're still making the corpses dance.

Sometimes I rant, in a comical way, about how the gods give with one hand and take with the other.

Every time I start a new piece of work, I spend a long while under the duvet thinking I can't do it.

I take life very seriously. I can laugh at it, because what else can you do? But it's a hard daily battle.

I always feel as if I'm a disappointment: that people want a grand dame in furs like Barbara Taylor Bradford.

I think we take it for granted that if you are with your husband after 30 years, then he is the love of your life.

I'm spectacularly disorganised. I wrote my latest book in seven different notebooks scattered throughout my house.

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

There's only one thing more boring than listening to other people's dreams, and that's listening to their problems.

I usually listen to the same thing over and over again: Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major. And Leonard Cohen.

My second husband encouraged me to go to a writing group at our local theatre. It was my 'coming out of the closet' moment.

I have decided to keep a full journal, in the hope that my life will perhaps seem more interesting when it is written down.

I'd love a day devoid of responsibilities. I've often thought about going to a hotel just to have a day away from everything.

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.

I hate it when people call me a 'national treasure.' It takes away your bite and makes you feel like a harmless old golden Labrador.

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

I have a slight addiction to Diet Coke, and, of course, I absolutely shouldn't touch it because it makes the kidneys work really hard.

In the playground, I always made people laugh; I used to charge them three pence for an impression of a teacher. It kept me in toffees.

I am surrounded by counselors. My sister is a counselor. My daughter is training to be a counselor. A lot of my friends are counselors.

Yes, I hate it when people call me a 'national treasure'. It takes away your bite and makes you feel like a harmless old golden Labrador.

8.45 a.m. My mother is in the hospital grounds smoking a cigarette. She is looking old and haggard. All the debauchery is catching up with her.

I am from the working class. I am now what I was then. No amount of balsamic vinegar and Prada handbags could make me forget what it was like to be poor.

In the early days, it was, you know, I used to weep while I was writing. I used to grab at any kind of anything, any hint, any tip of how to make it easy.

I always wanted to be Jo in 'Little Women.' She's a bit reckless and feckless, always getting into trouble like me. But I'm probably more like Madame Bovary.

Adrian Mole's father was so angry that so many pepole got divorced nowadays. HE had been unhappilly married for 30 years, why should everybody else get away?

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.

I do think that books, good books, free you. They make you feel a citizen of the world and things like class, sex and age don't matter. They're the greatest leveler.

'The Gambler' by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.

I asked Mr. Vann which O levels you need to write situation comedy for television. Mr. Vann said that you don't need qualifications at all, you just need to be a moron.

I think it's essential for comic writers to have a hate figure, a despot, a regime to react against, and I think Thatcher was perfect for me, I loathed everything she stood for.

We had library books in our house, but not our own. So you had 14 days to read them. There would be eight books a fortnight in our house and I'd read as many of those as I could.

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.

It's no surprise to me that intellectuals commit suicide, go mad or die from drink. We feel things more than other people. We know the world is rotten and that chins are ruined by spots.

Share This Page