The only way I can work is to keep to a proper schedule. I try to be at my desk by 6am and work for two hours before breakfast and then work again until 4pm. I spend half the day thinking and half the day writing. I don’t know how writers who don’t have a routine get anything done.

Encouragement is the greatest gift you can give your child. My parents always told me I could do anything. My mother told me I could write. My father bought me a typewriter.

When I wrote A Woman of Substance I didn’t sit down and think, I’m going to write about a woman warrior who conquers the world and smashes the glass ceiling, but I did want to write about women in a positive way. At the time there were a lot of very sexy books out there but the women didn’t come out of them very well.

Human nature hasn’t changed since the Roman times. We’re still all doing the same things to each other. We still have the same emotions, the same sorrows, the same hatreds and desires.

The most dangerous place to be is in the middle of a very large family. I know that’s true even though I’m an only child.

A novel is a monumental lie that has to have the absolute ring of truth if it’s going to succeed.

I don’t waste my time on something I’m not enjoying. Recently I went with my husband Bob to see a play and we both fell asleep after half an hour, we were so bored. At the interval I turned to him and said: “Bob, this is the most boring play I have ever seen,” and he said: “Let’s go.”

I’d have liked to have had children, but I didn’t let my lack of them define me. If you keep regretting what might have been, it becomes hard to bear.

Most successful people have known what they wanted to be since childhood. I sold my first story at the age of 10.

Sometimes I look through my list of books – I’ve just handed in the manuscript for my 32nd – and think: “I can’t remember writing that at all.” I recently came across one about a journalist in Sarajevo at the time of the Balkans war and didn’t remember anything about it. So I started reading it again. It turned out it was a really good book.

Writing today is a funny business. You do wonder how long we’re going to have books. I still tell young people with the imagination to go for it. Just be sure that if it doesn’t work out, you have something else you can try.

The first thing I do when I finish a book is think, now I have two weeks when I can do anything I want. What do I do? Not much, go out and shop for pantyhose and try on shoes, probably.

The Secret of Cavendon by Barbara Taylor Bradford out now (HarperCollins £16.99)