I love Billy Wilder, and I love the way that his films can be very touching and very moving and very romantic, and at the same time there's always a little cynical undertone, there's always something that undercuts things.

Well, I don't think Hollywood's a dirty word at all, I love a lot of Hollywood films.

To have had fame, even very minor fame, and to have lost it, got older and maybe put on a little weight is a kind of living death.

She made a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.

The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It’s just that they don’t love me back.

She had reached a turning point. She no longer believed that a situation could be made better by writing a poem about it.

A joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hand like a cheap umbrella.