Carol Drinkwater

“To say I love the Christmas season at our home in the South of France is an understatement. I get such a kick out of preparing the house for the arrival of family; seeing our scruffy old villa bursting at the seams with loved ones.”

“I think the sense of performance and theatre was in my blood very early - but my father was more involved in music and light entertainment, whereas I wanted to do serious classical acting. I wanted to be Dame Carol Drinkwater.”

“The widespread use of pesticides in the French countryside, and its worrying effects on nature and the environment, had troubled me for years.”

“I have discovered France's best-kept secret. Reunion is an island of some 970 square miles situated in the Indian Ocean south-west of Mauritius and east of Madagascar.”

“Salamanca is known as La Ciudad Dorada, the Golden City, because it is built from Villamayor sandstone and when the sun reflects on it the city has a warm amber tint. The university, founded in 1218, is the fifth-oldest in Europe and one of the most renowned, judged on a par with Oxford.”

“You won't find a publisher until you have written the book and you won't find the time till you sit down, stay down, and write it. No one else is going to do it and that is a fact.”

“After the first Olive Farm book was published, in 2001 I got a three-book deal with Orion for a large sum of money. Obviously it did not come all at once, but it made the difference to living here on a shoestring to being able to turn the whole place around.”

“Part of the thing about why I wrote memoirs rather than a novel is that if anybody is going to tell my story it is going to be me in my way.”

“I wrote my first play when I was nine, it was about Robin Hood, from Maid Marian's point of view. I was a feminist from day one.”

“Despite trying to keep luggage to minimum, I do like to have all my cleansers and my hair and nail things to hand.”

“I get so much mail from women who have lost children because one of my books is about that. There was also a period when my marriage was in difficulty, which people connected with.”

“I like the freedom of novels. With the memoirs, I always had to keep to the facts. I like that with novels, if I want to go off and write something quite dramatic or outrageous or something completely different, I can do it if I want to.”

“If someone called and the role was good and there was dignity and integrity in the piece, I'd be up for it, of course I would. It's so hard for older women in acting so when you hear of an older woman having a renaissance in their career, I really applaud it.”

“Provence off the beaten track offers silence, stillness, sweet scents, eagles, chestnuts, endless avenues shaded by plane trees, fabulous walking, cycle tracks and beaches to die for.”

“Organic olive farming was going to be a particularly tricky challenge, but Michel and I needed to take a risk and let the problems iron themselves out as we came up against them. It was time to make a leap of faith, just like we'd done when buying this farm.”

“I never think of people's literary potential when I meet them, but people do audition.”

“Personal loss is a trial that we all face. Like every negative challenge we rise to it or we don't. You grow stronger as you work your way through whatever life has thrown at you or you buckle and go under.”

“The olive's properties are not altered, but the flavour of oil pressed from green olives is different from black - green oil tends to be peppery and black has a more mushroomy taste.”

“Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Biarritz was a community of whalers. During the Middle Ages, it had grown from a small fishing village into a profitable whaling industry. Whale oil was liquid gold to these sea-faring folk.”

“My father started out as a musician but he had a salary from a day job working as a health inspector for the government. When he left to set up his own entertainment agency his income became more uncertain.”