Most women work not from yearning for fulfilment but yearning to pay the mortgage.

A smaller waist is not the solution to all your problems.

Ironically, heavier comedians, actors, and the characters they play are actually more sympathetic, and easier for audiences to identify with, than the svelte.

Weight having become politicised, anyone with a profile in the media who either subscribes to or departs from the template of tininess implicitly represents a constituency, whether they want to or not.

Letting ourselves down in some fashion is such an integral part of daily life that the paucity of literature on the subject is baffling.

Hungry for both fantasy and inspiration, readers crave protagonists who, after overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, triumph at the end of the day.

The sign that I don't like the book I'm reading is finding myself watching reruns of 'Come Dine With Me.'

The dumbest childhood vow I ever made was to finish every book I started.

Laws to protect 'public health' are potentially infinite, especially once they no longer have to be supported by any research whatsoever.

A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum.

In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?

Set a good example as parents, since the most convincing argument that a girl can become a computer coder is that her mother is one.

Over my lifetime, heavy usage has woefully eroded profanity's power.

As individuals are best off believing they control their behaviour, the judiciary is best off imputing that control - barring powerful extenuating factors such as mental illness.

Perhaps scientists will eventually discover that we are all clockwork bunnies, and our experience of volition is an electro-chemical illusion.

For the left-leaning, political identity is liable to be closely intertwined with personal identity. The left is collusive, if not presumptuous: should you get on well with leftists at a party, they will blithely assume that you share the same views on the invasion of Iraq, even if all you've talked about is the canapes.

For storytellers, financiers make ideal rogues. The easiest way to make characters unappealing is to make them rich - shorthand for spoiled, picky, superior, and cold-hearted.

In my teens, I eyed my adulthood with trepidation, as if stalked by a stranger - one who would seize control as if by demonic possession and regard my fledgling incarnation with contempt.

I was terrified of growing up to become the anti-me, maturing into a woman whom I would not recognise and who wouldn't recognise her younger self.

Hypersensitivity has become a weapon.

Overly vigorous investigations of ominously ill-defined 'bullying' can themselves constitute a form of bullying.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.

I'm not a religious person. Chances are that the universe neither treasures nor regrets us.