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

Deborah Moggach

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

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

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

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

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

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

" My favourite room in my house is easily the top room, which is a bedroom but also a bathroom, with a big, wooden carved bath, two huge fireplaces and a raised bit in the corner for performances. I've had some really lovely parties and poetry readings up there. "

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

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

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

" I wanted to be a landscape architect, but I trained as a teacher; I worked in publishing; I was a waitress. "

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

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

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

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

Deborah Moggach

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

Deborah Moggach

" 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?' "

Deborah Moggach

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

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach

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

Deborah Moggach

" 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. "

Deborah Moggach