Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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 look in the mirror expecting to be 34 and see someone who is 58. What's that all about? I haven't even thought about turning 60 yet, but so many of my friends have celebrated it by now that it's lost its terror. And I don't mind being 58; it's just such a surprise when one doesn't feel it at all.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.