Top 35 Deborah Moggach Quotes

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.

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.

If people want to take their lives and are helped to do so, the punishment is tragic for all concerned.

Independence is fun, especially when there’s a beloved waiting in the wings, and freedom makes you a more interesting person. Having separate lives brings fresh air into a relationship.

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.

‘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.

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

I’m mad about gardening. I have an allotment on the other side of Hampstead Heath, and I keep three hens in my garden.

I feel as if someone is going to come along, feel my collar and say: ‘Do you really think you can get people to read books you’ve made up about people that don’t exist?’

Whining writers are a hideous sight; we should really shut up, because we are lucky if we can cobble together a living from all of this.

My perfect day is to work incredibly well in the morning and write something wonderful, then take the dog for a walk and go for a swim in the ladies’ ponds on Hampstead Heath or work in my allotment. Then I get tarted up in the evening and go out in London to dinner or the cinema.

All I want is for people, when they read my books, to feel companioned, to feel they’re not alone in the world.

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

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

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

My parents were both writers – they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford – so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals.

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.

One sees more and more people who are miserable and demented and you feel it would be both kind and wise to leave them a few pills.

Living together places a huge burden on the other person to be lover, friend, entertainments manager, chef, domestic help, which is almost impossible and can lead to disappointment. If you don’t live together, you spend more time with other people and ease the pressure off your lover.

I wanted to be a landscape architect, but I trained as a teacher; I worked in publishing; I was a waitress.

Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it’s going well it’s more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt put it aside. Go for a swim, go for a walk, take a week off. Don’t panic or be afraid; you and your characters are in it together. Trust them to come to your rescue.

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.

You need to know the characters as living, breathing people before you start the plot; otherwise, you’ll feel panic, anarchy and chaos.

Nothing beats weaving through the rush-hour traffic or whizzing past the eternal gridlock that is the Strand.

My favourite room in my house is easily the top room, which is a bedroom but also a bathroom, with a big, wooden carved bath, two huge fireplaces and a raised bit in the corner for performances. I’ve had some really lovely parties and poetry readings up there.

I’m quite easy to live with and very easy going.

I’d like to be a jazz singer, but I couldn’t possibly do it; nobody would want me, anyway.

I’ve written something like 17 novels, which isn’t bad, I suppose, but my father wrote 120 books, my mother 40. In comparison, I’m lazy.

Psych yourself up until you’re confident that the world will be interested in what happens to your characters. Confidence is key.

Living apart is hardly possible if people have children together. It can also be more expensive to maintain two homes. But then, it’s expensive to break up when you live in one property.

The greatest artists know how to entertain, or else nobody would read them.

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

I like missing someone and being missed; I like looking forward to seeing him again. I like getting emails and texts with lots of xxx’s.

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 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.