It is customary for the writer to sneer that Hollywood has traduced their book. Well, I adore my film.

Oh, where is the Fairy Godmother of explanations when you need her?

Girls slightly younger tended to be Donny Osmond girls or Michael Jackson girls, but for my generation, it tended to be David Cassidy.

No man would ever use both hands to hold a cup of tea, unless he was one day's march from the South Pole, with one chum dead in the snow, dogs all eaten and six fingers about to drop off. And even then he would look around the empty tent to check, in case anybody thought it was girly.

The best musicians answer something in you when you don't even know the question.

Working mothers' laughter comes hardest when our double life is revealed for what it is: a juggling act in which the balls can drop at any time, invariably on our own head.

It's not easy to reach the summit of your career by the age of 24 -- and for the years after to be a humiliating scrabble downhill.

A father is the template of a man Nature gives a girl.

Anyone suffering Downton Abbey withdrawal symptoms will find an instant tonic.

Women run the small country called Home, millions of us do it in our spare time, and no one who doesn't run that small country really knows what it feels like in the dead of night when task lists jitter like tickertape through your seething brain.

I forget the derivation of Boxing Day, but the feeling of wanting to invite your loved ones outside one at a time and punch them in the face, does that come into it somewhere?

When you have kids, there's a tendency to put the marriage stew on the back burner and give it a quick stir now and then. But it's important to remember why you had children with this person.

My strong sense now is that, as women have become more equal in society, so their depictions onscreen have become lamer and lamer and lamer, to the point that it's an embarrassment.

My child was one of Nature's Tories pitted against a mother who was one of nurture's Lefties: it was no contest.

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.

Can't is for pussies.

I don't believe for a minute that women really want to be understood by men.

The quickest way to stop noticing something may be to buy it, just as the quickest way to stop appreciating a person may be to marry them.

Going through puberty, that Cape Canaveral of the hormones, young girls are in love with the idea of being in love, trying it out for sighs.

Endings are not my thing.