Deborah Moggach
Deborah Moggach
Deborah Moggachis an English writer. She has written eighteen novels including The Ex-Wives, Tulip Fever, These Foolish Thingsand Heartbreak Hotel...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth28 June 1948
garden mad hens
I'm mad about gardening. I have an allotment on the other side of Hampstead Heath, and I keep three hens in my garden.
disappointment real trying
The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment.
risk doe different
But it's also true that the person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing. All we know about the future is that it will be different. But perhaps what we fear is that it will be the same. So we must celebrate the changes.
travel peace ends
Everything will be alright in the end so if it is not alright it is not the end.
sister memories past
You keep your past by having sisters. As you get older, they're the only ones who don't get bored if you talk about your memories.
applying executives fear found hollywood spend trying useful whether
I found Hollywood pretty bruising and uncreative. The executives are all in thrall to the boss, and spend their times double-guessing him or her, and trying to remember what he/she said and then applying them to the script, whether it was useful or not. They're all in fear for their jobs.
dinner dog evening heath incredibly london morning perfect swim walk work
My perfect day is to work incredibly well in the morning and write something wonderful, then take the dog for a walk and go for a swim in the ladies' ponds on Hampstead Heath or work in my allotment. Then I get tarted up in the evening and go out in London to dinner or the cinema.
bluegrass both house near side sitting type writers
My parents were both writers - they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford - so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals.
almost burden domestic ease huge impossible lead living people places pressure spend time
Living together places a huge burden on the other person to be lover, friend, entertainments manager, chef, domestic help, which is almost impossible and can lead to disappointment. If you don't live together, you spend more time with other people and ease the pressure off your lover.
side
You can cycle through London on the side streets, which are less polluted - and much more interesting anyway.
collar people
I feel as if someone is going to come along, feel my collar and say: 'Do you really think you can get people to read books you've made up about people that don't exist?'
alone
All I want is for people, when they read my books, to feel companioned, to feel they're not alone in the world.
The greatest artists know how to entertain, or else nobody would read them.
life novelists pulling shape somewhere
All novelists I speak to about how they started usually say it was by pulling up their roots and going to live somewhere else. You see the shape of your life at a distance.