“I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had ...” — Nina Bawden Quote

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.

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 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.

There are many times when I think I would have rather died with my husband. It would have been pleasanter, simpler. But it would have been worse for the children and the family in general.

Rules are not immutable—they can be rewritten.

Hope is never absent. What’s absent is our faith in a reality that’s never absent.

Having read my share of tell-alls over the year, including some that were passed off as autobiographies, I mostly feel sad - sometimes for the writer and sometimes for all the people in his way. I hope that the process of writing the tell-all gives some release and closure on what clearly was an unpleasant and unfulfilling life experience.

Christianity is realistic because it says that if there is no truth, there is also no hope, and there can be no hope if there is no adequate base. It is prepared to face the consequences of being proved false and say with Paul, if you find the body of Christ, the discussion is finished, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. It leaves absolutely no room for a romantic answer.