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

Though with Bridget Jones's Baby: the Diaries, I'd like to make it clear that I did not ever get pregnant by two men.

It's rather fun writing a female spy, because she has so much more kit. Bond never carried a hair dryer or a makeup bag. And he certainly didn't wear an uplift bra.

It occurred to me that if Africa needed us, sometimes we needed Africa a great deal more.

Valentine's Day purely commercial, cynical enterprise, anyway. Matter of supreme indifference to me.

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.

I made my excuses and left, thinking, really, after a certain age, people are just going to do what they're going to do and you're either going to accept them as they are or you're not.