You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.

Being a mother has been my greatest teacher and also the most self-sacrificing thing I've ever done.

I must have got my detailed obsessive streak from my father who was an English teacher because my mother wasn't like me at all.

My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts my father was an evangelist a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland spreading the gospel.

A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating might ask her busy mother (or teacher) for help. The child gets one message if her mother expresses clear pleasure at the request and quite another if mommy responds with a curt 'Don't bother me - I've got important work to do.'

There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black woman mother dyke teacher etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.

Mama was my greatest teacher a teacher of compassion love and fearlessness. If love is sweet as a flower then my mother is that sweet flower of love.

My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike. She said little especially when my father or the men who worked for him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy for the miners.

You may lose your wife you may lose your dog your mother may hate you. None of those things matter. What matters is that you achieve success and become free. Then you can do whatever you like.

Look if you ask a child 'Would you rather have a fulfilled mother or a stay-at-home Sylvia Plath ' they'll pick Sylvia Plath every time. But I think it's really important that children don't feel their parents' emotional lives depend on their success.