Top 25 Laurie Graham Quotes

When my children were young, one of the treats promised by their grandparents was a ride in Grandad’s car.

In the Seventies, my children played in the street, read politically incorrect stories, ate home-cooked food and occasional junk and, yes, were sometimes smacked.

The wheels of publishing never slow down.

I’d like to see my grandchildren climb trees, not stand under them. I’d like to see them learn to make bread and brown it over a fire using my toasting fork.

Sundown is often the worst time of day for people with dementia. They can become restless and difficult.

People invade your space and offend your sensibilities because, to be plain, they couldn’t care less about you.

My research process doesn’t vary much. I do a little reading to establish a timeline and decide how I’m going to approach the story.

I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I’ve written in the first person.

I’ve never minded solitude. For a writer, it’s a natural condition. But caring for a dementia sufferer leads to a peculiar kind of loneliness.

In grief, after even the happiest of relationships, we go over things again and again.

Caring burns a lot of fuel – psychological and physical, too, if any lifting is involved. The energy tank is soon emptied, and the toll caring takes is well documented. It’s called carer burn-out.

I know my parents loved me – they certainly did everything they could for me – but displays of affection were kept on a distinctly low flame.

Far more than dreading ending up in a care home myself, I dread having to put my husband in one.

I think my mother was baffled by me. We were polar opposites. She was shy and retiring. I was over-fond of the limelight. Many times in my life, I was conscious of embarrassing her with my carrying on.

I’m married to an American, and although we live in Europe, I think of myself as an honorary American.

The word ‘carer’ makes me think of someone with a nylon overall and a long list of ‘clients’ to wash before she finishes her shift. A companion was something unique. A kind of live-in friend.

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.

I was fascinated by the culture clash between England and America in the 1950s. My first memories are of being a girl in those post-war years when things were really pretty grim. It wasn’t like that in America, which was real boom time.

My husband is leaving me. No dramas, no slammed doors – well, OK, a few slammed doors – and no suitcase in the hall, but there is another woman involved. Her name is Dementia.

I’m thankful my parents obliged me to live with the unvarnished truth: I might not have been a looker, but I was a better speller than the prettiest girl in my class, and I was funnier, too.

I’m married to an American, so I guess that has changed my perspective on the subjects I can write about.

I speak pretty fluent American, though I do so with a strong British accent, and I love America: The scale and the variety of it are astonishing to someone not born there, and I’m convinced that its energy and generosity have somehow rubbed off on me and affected my writing. For the better.

Times may have changed, but there are some things that are always with us – loneliness is one of them.

I have but one rule at my table. You may leave your cabbage, but you’ll sit still and behave until I’ve eaten mine.

Childhood doesn’t have to be perfect, and children don’t have to be beautiful. From a bit of grit may grow a pearl, and if pearl production doesn’t materialise, the outcome will still be preferable to the shallowness of vanity.