Mariella Frostrup

“Quite honestly, if we do manage to destroy the planet with our devil-may-care attitude to natural resources, I'd suggest we leave, as a dossier in our defence, the collected letters to agony aunts and uncles down the generations. It would certainly prove that we weren't all bad!”

“While we women dilly-dally, making decisions, leaving jobs half done, forgetting where we've put the house keys while we water the Hoover and leave the laundry in the dishwasher, men, like blinkered horses, look straight ahead, oblivious to peripheral vision, where a discarded pile of wet towels might have caught their eye.”

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

“As for tweeting and texting: impassioned discussions, particularly when they're intimate, don't work in abbreviated script messages. No relationship should begin or end in 140 characters.”

“I can't sleep in an isolated place without pills, earplugs, and both my children in bed with me for fear of scary, feral characters with a hankering for the wilderness.”

“I'm a control freak. And more so now that I have children.”

“I used to routinely turn down things that might compound the impression that I was some kind of vacuous blonde. But now, when I look back, I think I should have done them because I would be very rich - being taken seriously isn't all it's cracked up to be.”

“What an unappealing responsibility that is to lumber any prospective lover with: the need to be a saviour, not simply an equal partner.”

“As we mature, there are people with whom we run out of steam, but there are also those with whom a little straight talking would prove rewarding.”

“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.”

“Too often we forget that an ideal partner is someone who enhances an already full existence.”

“I have a very childish attitude to books - a very non-analytic enthusiasm... like Alice falling down the chute.”

“Ageing is one of those battles you're not going to win. I'll try to look as good as I can as long as I can. I don't think I'll do cosmetic surgery because I'm a wimp.”

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

“The great advantage of being human is that we can employ rational thought and resolve to change our circumstances.”

“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.”

“Emotions are products of our mind, and we can actually train ourselves to choose whether we banish or embrace them.”

“I don't want my daughter to think she has to dress like Beyonce!”

“I would go out with people who really didn't like me very much and then wonder why we weren't getting married!”

“Nothing can prepare you for the all-consuming nature of motherhood, and I am very aware of my good fortune, as I spent years fretting about whether I'd ever meet anyone to have a baby with.”