The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment.

"Everything will be alright in the end so if it is not alright it is not the end."

"The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment."

"All novelists I speak to about how they started usually say it was by pulling up their roots and going to live somewhere else. You see the shape of your life at a distance."

"You need to know the characters as living, breathing people before you start the plot; otherwise, you'll feel panic, anarchy and chaos."

"The traditional writer is a sensitive only child, asthmatic, who sits on the window seat watching the drops of rain slide down the pane, very introspective. I'm not inward-looking. I would never go to a shrink. I don't want to know what I'm thinking. I don't really like discussions in my family. It may be an avoidance thing."

"My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there."

"I found Hollywood pretty bruising and uncreative. The executives are all in thrall to the boss, and spend their times double-guessing him or her, and trying to remember what he/she said and then applying them to the script, whether it was useful or not. They're all in fear for their jobs."

"My parents were both writers - they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford - so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals."

"I have four Rhode Island Red hens. I get two eggs from them a day. They're feathered dustbins that eat leftover food and weeds, and they're easy to look after - I throw some grain at them in the morning, take the eggs and that's it. I love the sound of clucking."

"I hate fussing about in the kitchen when I have people over to supper, so I make a rich beef stew cooked in "wine "with carrots, sundried tomato paste and chopped chorizo sausage."

"Independence is fun, especially when there's a beloved waiting in the wings, and freedom makes you a more interesting person. Having separate lives brings fresh air into a relationship."

"Living together places a huge burden on the other person to be lover, friend, entertainments manager, chef, domestic help, which is almost impossible and can lead to disappointment. If you don't live together, you spend more time with other people and ease the pressure off your lover."

"Living apart is hardly possible if people have children together. It can also be more expensive to maintain two homes. But then, it's expensive to break up when you live in one property."

"A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on."

"The greatest artists know how to entertain, or else nobody would read them."

"I work every day from 9:30 or so until lunchtime. In the afternoons, I become a normal person - go shopping and do the garden and look after my grandchildren."

"I'd like to be a jazz singer, but I couldn't possibly do it; nobody would want me, anyway."

"When I was young, I couldn't imagine women of 60 falling in love. For one thing, people used to stay married; they weren't out in the jungle, searching for romance. Besides, these women just looked so ancient - permed hair, beige cardis."

"I do believe that we baby-boomers are reinventing ageing as we enter it. We're living longer and expecting more from life; the success of 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,' and other films and novels about finding love late in life, have shown that if we're up for it, there are adventures awaiting us."

"You can cycle through London on the side streets, which are less polluted - and much more interesting anyway."

"Cycling is the only way to free ourselves from the misery of the Tube, the wall-to-wall buses that line Oxford Street, the hopelessness of even thinking about driving."

"I like missing someone and being missed; I like looking forward to seeing him again. I like getting emails and texts with lots of xxx's."

"I did have a go with Botox, but I couldn't move my eyebrows. I also, at one point, had that filler stuff injected, but I looked like a hamster with wodges of food in its cheeks, so I stopped that."

"'Tulip Fever' did change my life. It did that thing that sometimes happens when a book takes off - it opened doors on to whole other worlds."

"I have a hippopotamus skull next to my bed, called Gregory. When I was six, my three sisters and I clubbed together and paid £4 for it in a junk shop. We collected owl pellets, ostrich eggs and sheep skulls for our natural history museum at home."

"It's a very rich brew that's in your psyche by the time you're in your 60s, and I think that's rather interesting. It makes you feel you've lived a very long life; it's like going on holiday to three different cities rather than spending two weeks in Lisbon. You look back on the holiday, and you seem to have been away forever."

"Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it's going well it's more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt put it aside. Go for a swim, go for a walk, take a week off. Don't panic or be afraid; you and your characters are in it together. Trust them to come to your rescue."

"I was never a lonely child who sat looking at the rain sliding down the window."

"It was very liberating, living in a foreign country, a place where everything was new and strange - the food, the customs, the climate, everything."

"Nothing beats weaving through the rush-hour traffic or whizzing past the eternal gridlock that is the Strand."

"Once you start cycling, the city opens up for you. No longer are you fighting it, hot and frustrated; no longer are you at the mercy of bus drivers, roadworks, decisions made by others and over which you have no control. Believe me, once you've tasted this freedom, you're hooked."

"All I want is for people, when they read my books, to feel companioned, to feel they're not alone in the world."

"I've had a very lucky life because I'm of this generation where everything was possible."

"I've written something like 17 novels, which isn't bad, I suppose, but my father wrote 120 books, my mother 40. In comparison, I'm lazy."

"I feel as if someone is going to come along, feel my collar and say: 'Do you really think you can get people to read books you've made up about people that don't exist?'"

"Whining writers are a hideous sight; we should really shut up, because we are lucky if we can cobble together a living from all of this."

"Bringing my two children up while writing was just a part of life. I'd much rather have had their interruptions than been stuck in a sterile office. This way, I had welcome distractions. I had to load the washing machine, I had to go out and buy lemons."

"Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe."

"Psych yourself up until you're confident that the world will be interested in what happens to your characters. Confidence is key."

"Discover the times when you're most creative - mornings, nights, afternoons - and clear the time to work then. Many writers find the mornings are best, and the afternoons are only good for editorial corrections, or getting the washing done. Others can only work through the night, drunk."

"I'm always running my mouth off and getting myself in trouble, so I'm trying to do it less."

"It's not a failure if a marriage or partnership ends after a certain number of years. I think, in general, we expect too much of partners. We can't fulfil a person's every single need and, after ten years or so, many relationships wear out. If we were more philosophical about it, we wouldn't try to blame the other person or be bitter."

"Men take much more notice of older women in France, so I might move there. I think I'm a good bet."

"I'm quite easy to live with and very easy going."

"I am a great believer in having the power to end your life and knowing that, in extremis, you can. But I would not want to involve anybody else in my actions if it could imperil them."

"If people want to take their lives and are helped to do so, the punishment is tragic for all concerned."

"One sees more and more people who are miserable and demented and you feel it would be both kind and wise to leave them a few pills."

"My perfect day is to work incredibly well in the morning and write something wonderful, then take the dog for a walk and go for a swim in the ladies' ponds on Hampstead Heath or work in my allotment. Then I get tarted up in the evening and go out in London to dinner or the cinema."

"I'm mad about gardening. I have an allotment on the other side of Hampstead Heath, and I keep three hens in my garden."