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I see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone's life.

I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.

I've been asked to write an autobiography, and I've started it a couple of times, on different angles, and maybe one day I will, but you know what? There's time for that because I'd like to have the whole story.

I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.

My grandfather started his autobiography before he died; he never finished it. I would like to finish his autobiography because I finished mine.

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

I want to be remembered as a storyteller.

In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults.

Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.

I held a variety of jobs - most notably ten years working in universities - and kept on writing.