Quotes from Sue Townsend

Live with all of your senses.

I do think that books, good books, free you. They make you feel a citizen of the world and things like class, sex and age don't matter. They're the greatest leveler.

Most social problems could be helped or prevented if people had more money and practical advice.

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

In the playground, I always made people laugh; I used to charge them three pence for an impression of a teacher. It kept me in toffees.

My second husband encouraged me to go to a writing group at our local theatre. It was my 'coming out of the closet' moment.

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.

My cream and black Aga. It is the heart of the house, and people congregate around it.

I take life very seriously. I can laugh at it, because what else can you do? But it's a hard daily battle.

In the early days, it was, you know, I used to weep while I was writing. I used to grab at any kind of anything, any hint, any tip of how to make it easy.

I prefer to keep my secrets to myself, to the grave... and beyond!

I must have been a very strange child. I was very pretentious. Like Adrian Mole.

I seem to be able to get depressed quite easily without any reason.

I am the world's worst diabetic.

I always feel as if I'm a disappointment: that people want a grand dame in furs like Barbara Taylor Bradford.

Being poor with three small children is terrifying. You can't make any plans. You know you're not going on holiday, ever. There's no way you could ever afford driving lessons or a car. And the guilt I used to feel: they had holes in their shoes, and at one point, I had to send them to school wearing Wellingtons when the sun was shining.

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.

I became an insomniac, really, hardly slept at all, didn't even try to. And it's carried on. I hate to say I only need as much sleep as Mrs. Thatcher, but I can cope really well on five hours.

I have decided to keep a full journal, in the hope that my life will perhaps seem more interesting when it is written down.

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

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.

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

'The Gambler' by Dostoevsky. It was the first time I realised that it was possible to have good and evil in one person. It led me to read a lot of Russian literature.

I'm getting to the end of my magnifying glasses now. One eye's gone completely. The other is gradually dimming. Dimming - that sounds very dramatic, doesn't it? I'm so lucky. I can still make a living - and the same kind of living.