Motherhood was my career. I'm totally satisfied with that.

My career choice was to be a mother.

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

My kids don't drink and don't smoke. For me, that's a great blessing.

We were an ill-matched pair, my husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a husband's authority and a wife's submission, holding strongly to the 'master-in-my-own-house theory,' thinking much of the details of home arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty appeased.

We need leaders who will stand unapologetically in defense of marriage.

We all want to be carried away to a whole other world and have romantic tendencies about escaping to an exotic place and being swept off our feet.

I felt that, in some ways, my novels lacked heart because of the distance between me and the subject matter. But no one wants to read a book based on good health, a happy upbringing, a long marriage.