Quotes from Nina Bawden

I grew up on a suburban street with lace curtains and dull neighbours, so I made up stories to tell my friend, in which they became serial killers and burglars. She told her mother, who then told mine.

I dislike the word 'victim.' I dislike being told that I 'lost' my husband - as if I had idly abandoned you by the side of the railway track like an unwanted pair of old shoes.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.

Ten thousand pounds is the legal value of a negligently taken life, of a child or a parent. A cold and somewhat mean-spirited calculation: you would do better if you slipped on a paving-stone and broke a front tooth.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

Labeled like parcels—Caroline Wendy Willow and Nicholas Peter Willow—only with no address to be sent to. None of them, not even the teachers, knew where they were going. "That's part of the adventure," Carrie's mother had said, and not just to cheer them up; it was her nature to look on the bright side. If she found herself in hell, Carrie thought now, she'd just say, "Well, at least we'll be warm .

All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.

I suppose I do complain sometimes. Who doesn't? We all know (or believe secretly) that when we were children we were happy and trusting and hopeful and good and that we would still be all these pleasant things if sometime, somewhere, somehow, we had not been betrayed.