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Life doesn't go on forever, and you don't want to drop dead without ever having done what you wanted to do.
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The truth about love is that you don't always fall in love with whom you are supposed to fall in love with. Love just hits you. It is a transcendent thing. Sometimes it is your best friend's husband and sometimes it's your father. It's weird. But that's a fact of life.
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I think the bravest thing to write about is nothing, just to write a book in which nothing happens.
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I loved horses and horse books as a child.
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My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing - the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind.
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When I was at university, there was such a strong delineation between city kids and those who had grown up the suburbs. City kids were so at home in the world, in a way that suburban kids take years to catch up, if indeed they ever can.
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One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.
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Like many other people of my generation, I don't think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn't ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on.
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In my experience, adults rarely bother reading the reviews of children's books and almost never read the books themselves - particularly if they don't have children.
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My daughter is a fantastic travelling companion - she's totally organised, whereas I'm hopeless.
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Although I've lived in England for more than twenty years, I still have a foreigner's passion for all the details of English history and rural life.
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The more you live, the better writer you are.
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I, a late riser, fantasise about getting up every morning at 5 A.M. to fetch the horses in from the fields.
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I am quite a cheerful, dark person. On the outside, I'm optimistic but I expect the worst to happen.
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When you read a book, the neurons in your brain fire overtime, deciding what the characters are wearing, how they're standing, and what it feels like the first time they kiss. No one shows you. The words make suggestions. Your brain paints the pictures.
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I lived in New York for 10 years, and every New Yorker sees a shrink.
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I've been fired five times for having a bad attitude.
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Writing's a great skill, but thinking's a better one.
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While working in advertising, I channelled my creative energy into elaborate escape fantasies: cake making, dog breeding, the Peace Corps.