I hope I am remembered by my children as a good fa...

The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come if you don't, there's no hope for you.

Your work is first, learning is first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

My dad encouraged us to fail. Growing up, he would ask us what we failed at that week. If we didn't have something, he would be disappointed. It changed my mindset at an early age that failure is not the outcome, failure is not trying. Don't be afraid to fail.

I was a mixture of being incredibly old for my age and incredibly backwards. I was born quite old, but then I stopped growing. I lived with my mum and dad till I was 30.

You get to a certain age and you can't judge yourself on your dad or your parents.

If you love somebody, you love them. My parents had a 25-year age gap between them and my mum was the breadwinner, my dad the house husband. I'm a strong believer that a good relationship can work, whatever the situation.

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

I don't think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good.

Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation for it is better to be alone than in bad company.

A man is born alone and dies alone and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode.

Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.

Many believe - and I believe - that I have been designated for this work by God. In spite of my old age, I do not want to give it up I work out of love for God and I put all my hope in Him.

I feel like a lot of the female relationships I see on TV or in movies are in some way free of the kind of jealousy and anxiety and posturing that has been such a huge part of my female friendships, which I hope lessens a little bit with age.

It seems to me there is a change in what audiences want to see. I can only hope that's correct, because there's an awful lot of people of my age around now and we outnumber the others.