43 Quotes by Nina Bawden

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.

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.

People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.

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.

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.

If you are going to make companies, corporations, actually responsible for the safety of other people's lives, then if they fail in their duty, the only thing to prevent them failing in their duty is the fear that they would be put behind bars.

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 exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deciding that I had failed ignominiously.

I am not a victim. I am an angry survivor.

I like stirring the pot - I think it's part of my duty, to shake people up a bit - make them look at things in a different way.