Nina Bawden Quotes

28 quotes in 564 categories

• I am not a victim. I am an angry survivor.
• 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…
• All writers are thieves; theft is a necessary tool of the trade.
• I was born in a small suburb of Ilford in a rather nasty housing estate that my mother despised. She had grown up in the…
• I like stirring the pot - I think it's part of my duty, to shake people up a bit - make them look at things…
• Children often have a much stronger concept of morality than adults.
• A writer's work may be a coded autobiography, but only a very close friend could decipher it.
• I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school…
• Adults get more confused by social worker jargon. Unlike children, they are also less likely to see two sides of an argument, and they no…
• I dislike the word 'victim.' I dislike being told that I 'lost' my husband - as if I had idly abandoned you by the side…
• 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…
• But I don't write about sex for today's teenagers. Or Doc Martens boots either. I'm more interested in exploring how exactly the world is run,…
• I would hate to live in the country, unless I was living on a farm.
• One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.
• People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.
• 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…
• 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…
• There are many times when I think I would have rather died with my husband. It would have been pleasanter, simpler. But it would have…
• I've never found it made the slightest difference being a woman - though there is a sort of feeling that as you get older you're…
• 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…

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