And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.

I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.

I wrote my first book at eight, all of four pages. At 10, I did a 40-page story. At 12, I wrote two stage plays.

I had given up on being beautiful. But I thought I could kind of inspire boys to write songs about me. So I became a music journalist at the age of 16.

Feminism has had exactly the same problem that "political correctness" has had: people keep using the phrase without really knowing what it means.

If you're not a confident person, pretend to be one.

I have a rule for working out if the root problem of something is, in fact, sexism. And it is this: asking 'Are the boys doing it? Are the boys having to worry about this stuff? Are the boys the centre of a gigantic global debate on this subject?