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

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

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.

I am the world's worst diabetic.

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

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 took my sight and mobility for granted.

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.

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

Live with all of your senses.

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

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

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.

I always have this image of a woman running across a desert carrying children, trying to find water and food, not knowing when they'll get that. And her feet are slashed up from the dry, hard earth... Even when I'm uncomfortable, sometimes in pain, or just cold... I think, 'Thank God for what I've got.'

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.

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.