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
actions anybody believer great involve knowing life power
I am a great believer in having the power to end your life and knowing that, in extremis, you can. But I would not want to involve anybody else in my actions if it could imperil them.
bringing buy children life load rather sterile stuck washing
Bringing my two children up while writing was just a part of life. I'd much rather have had their interruptions than been stuck in a sterile office. This way, I had welcome distractions. I had to load the washing machine, I had to go out and buy lemons.
change doors happens life opened takes
'Tulip Fever' did change my life. It did that thing that sometimes happens when a book takes off - it opened doors on to whole other worlds.
life
I've had a very lucky life because I'm of this generation where everything was possible.
adventures ageing believe best enter exotic expecting films finding late life living longer love novels shown success
I do believe that we baby-boomers are reinventing ageing as we enter it. We're living longer and expecting more from life; the success of 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,' and other films and novels about finding love late in life, have shown that if we're up for it, there are adventures awaiting us.
brew cities holiday life lived psyche rather seem spending three time weeks
It's a very rich brew that's in your psyche by the time you're in your 60s, and I think that's rather interesting. It makes you feel you've lived a very long life; it's like going on holiday to three different cities rather than spending two weeks in Lisbon. You look back on the holiday, and you seem to have been away forever.
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.
I'm quite easy to live with and very easy going.
written wrote
I've written something like 17 novels, which isn't bad, I suppose, but my father wrote 120 books, my mother 40. In comparison, I'm lazy.
characters months novel saw somebody spend until
Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.
explore needs noun novel private push screenplay utterly
A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.
confident interested until
Psych yourself up until you're confident that the world will be interested in what happens to your characters. Confidence is key.
normal until work
I work every day from 9:30 or so until lunchtime. In the afternoons, I become a normal person - go shopping and do the garden and look after my grandchildren.
possibly
I'd like to be a jazz singer, but I couldn't possibly do it; nobody would want me, anyway.