Deborah Moggach Life Quotations

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.

Bringing my two children up while writing was just a part of life. I'd much rather have had their interruptions than been stuck in a sterile office. This way, I had welcome distractions. I had to load the washing machine, I had to go out and buy lemons.

'Tulip Fever' did change my life. It did that thing that sometimes happens when a book takes off - it opened doors on to whole other worlds.

I've had a very lucky life because I'm of this generation where everything was possible.

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.

It's a very rich brew that's in your psyche by the time you're in your 60s, and I think that's rather interesting. It makes you feel you've lived a very long life; it's like going on holiday to three different cities rather than spending two weeks in Lisbon. You look back on the holiday, and you seem to have been away forever.

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.