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.

Eventually, I manage to cheer Mum up by allowing her to go through my wardrobe and criticize all my clothes.

I will not sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend.

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.

The whole point of diaries is that other people find them and read what you've put. I did once take to writing my inner thoughts on the computer at the end of other things I was writing and ended up faxing four pages of hideous stuff to my accountant so I don't do that now.

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."

For me, writing Bridget's [Jones] stories is an instinctive, organic thing, which tends to happen more by accident than design.