'I have never had writer's block'

'When you write popular books, it is easy to be maligned. When I write I don't know what is going to happen next, so if I don't know, the reader doesn't. I have never had writer's block - I am really lucky. I am a born storyteller. I started writing when I was 8. I used to read Dickens and Harold Robbins and thought, this is what I want to do...

I have a good relationship with my sister. I don't know where this thing came from, that we are enemies. We are very different but she has always been a agood sister to me, I never wanted to be anyone's little sister, so I said to myself I would carve my own path: I wanted to write. Everybody said, you can't do it, you did not go to college. And I said, I can do whatever I want to do.'

Jackie Collins, author of Confessions of a Wild Child, in The Times