Normally, when youre working on something, there are other characters that you have alliances with, and you have unified goals with some characters.

I would love to live free of the fear and sadness and real desperation that I think the effect of childbirth has on women, especially because we are expected to be so concerned by recovery from childbirth.

Postwar Europe was morally stagnant, and there was a lot of neo-conservatism.

The language of freedom-fighting was so co-opted by the baby boomers in order to express their now-hopelessly compromised ideologies that no other generation could emulate it without a smirk. This has created an apathetic generation in the West, with young people no longer distinguishing between the old order and the new.

I get quite disappointed that we're still telling stories that I think are problematic in terms of what they're saying about women.

When you talk to women who were working as print journalists or in broadcasting in the '50s, and then you talk to women who were working in the late '60s, there's an enormous difference. There had already been a huge transition. Then, of course, you get well into the '70s and there were women with children working.

I feel that it's important to fail now and again. For instance, if I go for a job and I don't get it, that makes me not a better person, but more balanced, more aware of what life is really like.