Nina Bawden Quotes

#1. 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.

Nina Bawden

#2. 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.

Nina Bawden

#3. Adults get more confused by social worker jargon. Unlike children, they are also less likely to see two sides of an argument, and they no longer think they can make the world a better place. That can make them rather boring, I suppose.

Nina Bawden

#4. 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.

Nina Bawden

#5. I hope in my books I help children to see their strengths, and show them I have some idea of what they may occasionally be going through. Especially at tricky moments when it is easier to go back and evade things rather than go forwards and confront them.

Nina Bawden

#6. 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.

Nina Bawden

#7. My family has served the country in almost every major war since the Civil War.

Jack Scalia

#8. One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

Nina Bawden

#9. Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

Paul Auster

#10. The Spice Girl Victoria Beckham has just published the story of her life. I confess that it is not in my reading table.

Mick Jagger

#11. But if there's an erosion at home, you know, Thomas Jefferson warned about a tyranny of an oligarchy and if we surrender our democracy to the tyranny of an oligarchy, we've made a terrible mistake.

Pat Robertson

#12. History is change happening one person at a time.

Matt Damon

#13. Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture, the additional act.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#14. At 11, I passed the scholarship - only just; I wasn't very good at maths - to Ilford County High for Girls. When the Second World War started we were evacuated, first of all to Ipswich, and then to Aberdare, Queen of the Valleys, in south Wales.

Nina Bawden

#15. But I don't write about sex for today's teenagers. Or Doc Martens boots either. I'm more interested in exploring how exactly the world is run, which doesn't really change that much from one generation to another.

Nina Bawden

#16. I grew up on a suburban street with lace curtains and dull neighbours, so I made up stories to tell my friend, in which they became serial killers and burglars. She told her mother, who then told mine.

Nina Bawden

#17. 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.

Nina Bawden

#18. 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.

Nina Bawden

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

Nina Bawden

#20. Life isn't so complicated for children. They have more time to think about the really important things. That's why I occasionally moralise in my children's books in a way I wouldn't dare when writing for adults.

Nina Bawden

#21. I've never found it made the slightest difference being a woman - though there is a sort of feeling that as you get older you're not so interesting.

Nina Bawden

#22. Ten thousand pounds is the legal value of a negligently taken life, of a child or a parent. A cold and somewhat mean-spirited calculation: you would do better if you slipped on a paving-stone and broke a front tooth.

Nina Bawden

#23. I feel like fame is wasted on me.

Ben Affleck

#24. 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.

Nina Bawden

#25. 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.

Nina Bawden

#26. Forgiving is not an easy thing to do.

Amanda Lindhout

#27. I like being alone. I have control over my own shit. Therefore, in order to win me over, your presence has to feel better than my solitude. You're not competing with another person, you are competing with my comfort zones.

Horacio Jones

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

Nina Bawden

#29. I would hate to live in the country, unless I was living on a farm.

Nina Bawden

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

Nina Bawden

#31. Children often have a much stronger concept of morality than adults.

Nina Bawden

#32. We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more.

Michael Shermer

#33. I met Richard Burton, an RAF cadet on a two-term course. I would have flirted more enthusiastically if it had not been for the horrid boils on the back of his neck.

Nina Bawden

#34. I wanted to be a war reporter - scrabbling around, exposing things. I didn't want to go to university, I wanted to get a job, but Auntie Beryl said I should go to Oxford.

Nina Bawden

#35. 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.

Nina Bawden

#36. I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

Pattiann Rogers

#37. 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.

Nina Bawden

#38. Jace laughed, that soft rich sound Clary loved so much. I'm warning you, that jacket is sexy. The Institute could go up in sexy, sexy flames.

Cassandra Clare