Rachel Johnson

“I talk to bankers, distributors, marketing people. I used to sit at home in my tracksuit bottoms, and the real excitement of my day would be going out to get a copy of 'Private Eye' and a latte.”

“With so many forty- and fifty something mums and dads in Converse stalking the streets, I can see why there's a slew of books about the menopause and middle age, the most recent addition being David Bainbridge's plucky, glass-half-full meditation or, as he calls it, 'natural history.'”

“When I'm called unkind... that really cuts to the quick. You can say anything else that you like about me.”

“I'd like to see women get on to boards and run companies despite the fact that men occupy the citadels of power.”

“Without my Johnson trademark mop of yellow hair, I think I would be nothing.”

“Being boring is just wrong, isn't it? You wouldn't have got anywhere being boring.”

“'The Lady' is a piddling little magazine that no one cares about or buys.”

“It's often discouraging sitting working at home, wondering whether to put the heating on, answering the doorbell to the gas board, feeling it's all utterly pointless.”

“The reason we all need a mutton alert, which needs constant testing, like smoke alarms, is because there is really no such thing as age-appropriate dressing any longer, as I know because my wardrobe is interchangeable with my daughter's.”

“Being blonde means people decide on sight that you are much prettier and nicer than you really are, just as Americans automatically add 10 points to someone's IQ when they hear an English accent. Fact.”

“People always say there's no such thing as bad publicity, and you always think they're right, because it seems self-evident: nobody's going to buy a magazine that nobody ever talks about, so people should want to buy a magazine that everybody's talking about.”

“Of course I'm naughty. I've always had to compete for attention, you see.”

“I am a total coffee snob and bore. If anyone makes the mistake of offering me 'a coffee' they tend to regret it - I'm worse than Mariah Carey, and the hot milk rider is completely non-negotiable.”

“I love writing journalism because it's all over in two hours and comes straight off the top of the head. Writing novels is soooooo much harder. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.”

“I think everyone can recognize the one-upmanship and the competition that go on wherever you are, especially among groups where the women don't have to hold down office jobs and instead get in a total snit about who won the longest carrot contest or took first prize for summer chutney in the August fete.”

“I'm worried about looking like a bad person when, in fact, I try to be a good person. I don't like the public image that I've been dressed with and it worries me.”

“I do not think that having children - I have three teenagers - keeps you young. The reverse. It thrusts you into a full-frontal confrontation with your own all-too-obvious maturity.”

“I want 'The Lady' magazine to be restored to its traditional place in the pantheon of weekly magazines.”

“Our parents provided us with the essentials, then got on with their own lives. Which makes me realise that my parents were brilliant, not for what they did, but more for what they didn't do.”

“I went freelance in 1996 and my children are now teenagers and it seemed right.”