You'll never get a boyfriend if you look like you wandered out of Auschwitz.

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.

As Bridget writes to her son, in Bridget Jones' Baby - "if you just keep calm and keep your spirits up, things have a habit of turning out all right, just as they did for me."

Sink into morbid, cynical reflection on how much romantic heartbreak is to do with ego and miffed pride rather than actual loss

I think the pressure to be perfect generally in life has amped up massively in the last twenty years: especially for young people with the advent of social media.

Oh God. valentine's Day tomorrow. Why? Why? Why is (the) entire world geared to make people not involved in romance feel stupid when everyone knows romance does not work anyway. Look at (the) royal family. Look at Mum and Dad.

Quite quickly I grew less deranged. I had begun the process of calming down, assimilating and compromising, which is necessary to live comfortably in the world as it is, and probably is why its imbalance never changes. But underneath, my idea of life was completely altered.