If you've been fat, you will always feel and see the world as a fat person; you know how difficult it is... It's the same coming from a working-class background... it never leaves you.

It's really best not to tell people when you feel bad. Growing up is about keeping secrets, and pretending everything is fine.

The first thing to improve society is not banning abortion, but making sure that everyone who had a child is in the best position to be able to rear it.

Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside jigsaws.

In the end I want to spend my 60s writing bonkbusters like Jilly Cooper.

In my family, my fat family, none of us ever say the word 'fat.' 'Fat' is the word you hear shouted on the playground or in the street - it's never allowed over the threshold of the house. My mum won't have that filth in her house. At home together, we are safe. ... There will be no harm to our feelings here because we never acknowledge fat exists. We never refer to our size. We are the elephants in the room.

I cannot understand antiabortion arguments that center on the sanctity of life. As a species, we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain, and lifelong, grinding poverty show us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.