I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out.

It is horrid to smirk.

When someone loves you it's like having a blanket all round your heart.

It occurred to me that if Africa needed us, sometimes we needed Africa a great deal more.

I like you very much. Just as you are.

It is proved by surveys that happiness does not come from love, wealth, or power but the pursuit of attainable goals.

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

One must not live one's life through men but must be complete on oneself as a woman of substance.

No one is thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves, just like you.

Tom has a theory that homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural bonding: both being accustomed to disappointing their parents and being treated as freaks by society.

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.

Life is difficult, easy, and wonderful. As you think, it is as such.

No amount of love from the outside can make up for the lack of self-love in one's heart.

If we actually thought about every decision we made, we'd be paralyzed ... You have to decide which decisions you're actually going to make, and then you have to let the rest of them go.

I took up boxing as a fitness thing. I got obsessed, and I would go every day when I wasn't working. It's just an insane sport when you get into it.

I prefer assonance and internal rhyme to end rhyme. I mean, the sonnet already looks like a box. Best not to get too boxed in, though.

I believe because I am told to believe ... My faith is faith; it is not evolved out of argumentation, nor does it seek the aid of that.

It is my fate that some of my questions will never be answered.

Breath is perhaps the first thing we have in life. It's how we measure the starting of life and it's how we measure the ending of life.

Bad writers have influences. Good writers steal.