Maeve Binchy Quotes

If you woke up each morning, and immediately dwelt on your ills, what sort of a day could you look forward to?

I’ve been very lucky and I have a happy old age with good family and friends still around.

I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.

I don’t have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turn into confident ducks.

Because I saw my parents relaxing in armchairs and reading and liking it, I thought it was a peaceful grown-up thing to do, and I still think that.

An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.