For his thirtieth birthday he had filled a whole night-club off Regent Street; people had been queuing on the pavement to get in. The SIM card of his mobile phone in his pocket was overflowing with telephone numbers of all the hundreds of people he had met in the last ten years, and yet the only person he had ever wanted to talk to in all that time was standing now in the very next room.

I work three days at home, and two days in the British Library or the London Library, just to get out of the house and hide from the children.

Who do you think you are, Jane Eyre? Grow up. Be sensible. Don't get carried away.

I think what it is is, if you're in school and you're not that bright or good-looking or popular or whatever, and one day you say something and someone laughs, well, you sort of grab onto it, don't you? You think, well I run funny and I've got this stupid big face and big thighs and no-one fancies me, but at least I can make people laugh. And it's such a nice feeling, making someone laugh, that maybe you get a bit reliant on it. Like, if you;re not funny then you're not...anything

She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.

The early days of any relationship are punctuated with a series of firsts - first sight, first words, first laugh, first kiss, first nudity, etc., with these shared landmarks becoming more widely spaced and innocuous as days turn to years, until eventually you're left with first visit to a National Trust property or some such.

Most of the books and films I love walk a knife edge between romance and cynicism, and I wanted 'One Day' to stay on that line. I wanted it to be moving, but without being manipulative.