Women today are bombarded with so many messages, like we should have Naomi Campbell's body and Madeleine Albright's career.

Reminded of favorite poem by Wendy Cope which goes: At Christmas little children sing and merry bells jingle. The cold winter air makes our hands and faces tingle. And happy families go to church and cheerily they mingle, And the whole business is unbelievably dreadful if you're single.

Of course the chronology of the books is a bit back- to - front, and books usually come out before movies. But happily, these [Bridget Jones's] are fictional comedy diaries - not a history of the Battle of Waterloo.

If the stories don't come from the inside out, then Bridget [Jones] is not being true to herself and it's very important to me that she stays that way.

Women today are bombarded with so many messages, like we should have Naomi Campbell's body and Madeleine Albright's career.

That's when the idea for Mad About the Boy arrived. It wasn't even a Bridget [Jones] story initially - then I realized I was writing in Bridget's voice and it grew from there into a Bridget novel.

..we were always taught, instead of waiting to be swept off our feet, to 'expect little, forgive much'.