A biography for Maeve Binchyhasn’t been written yet.
“We have to make our own happiness, and we have to make our own decisions and play the hand that is dealt to us.”
“My brother married young, and his is the best marriage I know.”
“Happiness is in our own hearts. I have no regrets of anything in the past. I'm totally cheerful and happy, and I think that a lot of your attitude is not in the circumstances you find yourself in, but in the circumstances you make for yourself.”
“The most important thing to realise is that everyone is capable of telling a story. It doesn't matter where we were born or how we grew up.”
“My mother was a trained nurse, and she'd tell me that patients would fight as they were administered anaesthetic, grappling to get the gas mask off their face.”
“Modern surgery has been like a miracle to those who thought the pain was going to go on forever.”
“I've seen a lot of people buy my books and then fall asleep on the plane soon afterwards.”
“We are all the heroes and heroines of our own lives. Our love stories are amazingly romantic; our losses and betrayals and disappointments are gigantic in our own minds.”
“Success is not like a cake that needs to be divided. It's more like a heap of stones - a cairn. If someone is successful, they add a stone to the cairn. It gets very high and can be seen from all over the world. That's how I see it.”
“On the first day of school, my father told me I'd be the most popular girl and everyone would love me and want to be my friend. It wasn't so, but it gave me an enormous amount of confidence.”
“I believed that old people never laughed. I thought they sighed a lot and groaned. They walked with sticks, and they didn't like children on bicycles or roller skates... or with big dogs.”
“I think you've got to play the hand that you're dealt and stop wishing for another hand.”
“Nobody ever wins by the cavalry coming to rescue you. It isn't a question of you're happy if you get married, or you get thin, or you get rich, because I've known lots of thin, rich, married people who are absolutely miserable.”
“I was fat, and that was awful because when you're young and sensitive, you think the world is over because you're fat.”
“When I was teaching Latin in girls' schools before I became a writer, I didn't much like it if parents would come in and say, 'We'll have less of the Ovid and Virgil and more of the grammar, please.' After all, I was the one in charge. That's how I feel about doctors. You should trust them to do their job properly.”
“I didn't have a sweet tooth, but I liked butter, and I liked sauces, and I liked wine... and curry... and cheeses.”
“If you woke up each morning, and immediately dwelt on your ills, what sort of a day could you look forward to?”
“Of course, I should have done what doctors said and walked for miles every day and not eaten great amounts of butter. But then, life is life, and if we all did what they said we should do, it would be a different world.”
“I was just lucky I lived in this time of mass-market paperbacks.”
“If I had my life to live all over again, I really think I would have been a fit person. Looking around me, I realise that the men and women who walked and ran and swam and played sport look better and feel better than the rest of us.”