43 Quotes by Nina Bawden

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 country, so when the war came and I was evacuated to Wales she thought I was much better off there.

Margaret Thatcher was in my year, and our first-year college photograph shows us standing side by side in the back row. We were both grammar school girls on state scholarships.

A writer's work may be a coded autobiography, but only a very close friend could decipher it.

The kind of response I hope for when I write my novels for children: to give them a chance to recognize something of their own feelings -- about themselves, their parents, their friends -- and their own situation as a kind of subject race, always at the mercy of the adults who mostly run their lives for them.

All writers are thieves; theft is a necessary tool of the trade.

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 of our education.

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.

I met my second husband on a bus. We looked at each other and that was it. We were both married to other people at the time and behaved badly, but we didn’t seem to have any choice. We were very happy for nearly 50 years and would still be together if it wasn’t for the bloody railways.

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.