With longer life spans and better health and education, many feel that giving birth to a baby a mere couple of decades after they themselves were in the cradle is a little premature.

In my late teens and early twenties, I thought having children was possibly the most irresponsible thing you could do because I thought that the world was a dreadful place; I thought the sooner we all got off the planet, the better.

Men want children later, but women can't rely on being able to. So I'm all for scientific advances and the help they can give people.

I know we should aspire to be higher philosophical beings, contemplating the universe and becoming more refined humans, but if all we did was think, then arguably we'd never have invented the wheel.

Writers want to talk. They can't wait to tell you what they've been thinking. And because they've been in solitude, they've had some fairly decent thoughts.

From Mozambique to Chad, South Africa and Liberia, Sierra Leone to Burkina Faso, feminism is the buzzword for a generation of women determined to change the course of the future for themselves and their families.

In romance, we feel the need to zoom in and expound on our partner's foibles in intimate detail; in friendship, we tend to do the opposite, avoiding confrontation through fear, lethargy or both.

There are more than enough people with serious mental issues who really do need professional help without all the other Toms, Dicks and Harriets rushing to the therapist's couch.

When I last looked, there weren't queues of eager guys under 40 hanging outside single ladies' doors begging them to give up work and have their babies. It takes two to tango and the same number, without medical help, to make a child.

It's an absolute disgrace that there isn't a books programme on the BBC.

Like cars, every relationship requires a bit of an occasional service, and fine-tuning should be compulsory.

If I was going to write something, I'd need to stop for three months and just see if I had any thoughts in there.

I hate the thought of my children being glued to a screen. Children only play on computers all day because their parents let them.

When a father of a daughter dies, you elevate them. And you sort of deify them.

Television executives only commission something that somebody else has already commissioned that's doing well on another station - they're afraid of expecting an audience to concentrate for longer than three minutes on any particular item.

I was brought up in the countryside in Ireland and would go bonkers if I couldn't escape the city. I like to wake and hear birds tweeting, not the low drone of traffic.

Joy acts like a trampoline, everything that touches it bouncing right back off it.

Seeing the world differently is one of the toughest incompatibilities to reconcile in a relationship.

Loneliness and rootlessness are just symptoms of an insecurity that assails us all when hitting this midlife moment. The world appears intent on blanking you out.

I couldn't choose a favourite author, but two contemporary writers who have never disappointed me are Tim Winton and Alice Munro.

My parents split up, and a lot of things going on in the outside world made me want to immerse myself in an alternative world.

I recognise my old self in a lot of the letters I get from single women who are unrealistic about what they want.

We invest less in our friendships and expect more of friends than any other relationship. We spend days working out where to book for a romantic dinner, weeks wondering how to celebrate a partner or parent's birthday, and seconds forgetting a friend's important anniversary.

Sustaining true friendship is a lot more challenging than we give it credit for.