In my family, we can't just sit and be together. We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or something. A larger task. Some way of being with people.
If somebody gave you several thousand dollars and nothin' to do but write, would you be a writer then? Would you tell your stories, your family's stories, then?
Characters in a book are very much like personalities divvied up within a family. In the end, it all averages out to a sort of overall averageness.
The great thing about coming from where I come from - Liverpool and my family - is that we're very close. I have a great relationship with my siblings and their kids.
I've got a great family and a beautiful house. I feel very lucky as far as my lifestyle is concerned. I'm not really interested in fame and all its trappings.
Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.
Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.
For centuries my father's family lived on Britain's biggest tidal river, the Severn, on which there was a huge trade with the interior, and through the Port of Bristol with America.
The welfare culture tells the man he is not a necessary part of the family; he feels dispensable, his wife knows he is dispensable, his children sense it.
But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, 'How can I combine career and family?'
Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else.
I was not supposed to be in any way a liberated person. I was a female born in the '40s in a patriarchal family; I was supposed to marry and make everyone around me happy.
I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.
Growing up, there wasn't much emphasis on being nice or naughty. As a family, there wasn't much discipline. It was more relaxed at home, which I'm grateful for.
Comedy has always been important in my family. If you got in a good joke at the dinner table, it meant more than almost anything else.
I have been called a nun with a switchblade where my privacy is concerned. I think there's a point where one says, that's for family, that's for me.
With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.
I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.
I say, If everybody in this house lives where it's God first, friends and family second and you third, we won't ever have an argument.
I've been to all 50 states, and traveled this whole country, and 90 percent of the people are good folks. The rest of them take after the other side of the family.
To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.
