She wrote in her autobiography: "It is so hard for us
little human beings to accept this deal that we get. It's really crazy, isn't
it? We get to live, then we have to die. What we put into every moment is all we
have. ... What spirit human beings have! It is a pretty cheesy deal — all the
pleasures of life, and then death."

 "a real  artist is neither noble nor heroic, and the artistic life is a solitary,
unsavory, scrappy ordeal that never lets up until you die. " ( Joyce
Cary's classic novel about an old painter, The Horse's
Mouth)

born in Ballyhaunis, Ireland  (1910). He grew up in Bolton in Lancashire, England,
where his father worked as  a miner. Bill worked as a coalbagger, weaver,
and a truck driver, but he started  writing occasionally for himself.
He said, "There was the odd occasion when I
might get a sentence to match up almost perfectly with what I felt, and this
simple act gave me a glow of satisfaction, even a touch of self-esteem. At times
I'd be so overcome by the reconciliation I might achieve between imagination and
writing, that I would feel a need to sneak out to the front door, sit on the
doorstep, breathe in the sweet, cool air, gaze up at the night sky, and try to
think of eternity, the soul, beauty, and images remote from lorries, spades and
coal. It was as though something was urging me on in what appeared even to me to
be a vain and hopeless quest."


It didn't turn out to be vain and hopeless after all. His plays include Alfie (1963)
and Spring and Port
Wine (1965)