Victoria Coren Mitchell

“Anger at the wealth gap is no longer about dukes in horse-drawn carriages; it's about vast, tax-dodging corporations. This will not be assuaged by seeing the royal family claiming to live like we do. If anything, that will make us angrier.”

“When I was at school, I got into trouble quite often.”

“A long time ago, my grandfather used to play blackjack with me, when I was very small, and I quite enjoyed that.”

“The key to nature's therapy is feeling like a tiny part of it, not a master over it. There's amazing pride in seeing a bee land on a flower you planted - but that's not your act of creation, it's your act of joining in.”

“When I was at school, I loved maths and read lots of books and was horrified at the idea of having a boyfriend... I was probably a nerd, but then, it was a negative term.”

“I was never, in my whole school career, given a job as a monitor, a form captain, or a prefect. I never won any kind of prize.”

“Society is notoriously stupid in its failure to harness the wisdom of older women in everything from television to politics, family life to boardrooms, and here is one reminiscing with honesty and realism about women's particular challenge: to create our professional and financial structures in the same period as our peak fertility.”

“I'm not a luddite. Science, computers, medicine, they're all great. But nature is context. That which we can't control. Its constant mortality and immortality is an answer to the terror of finite existence. It reassures the soul.”

“Women are under-represented in TV comedy for a variety of reasons, the hackneyed 'fear that women aren't funny' being one of them.”

“The best thing about universal free school meals is that they would remove one of the embarrassing signals, easily picked up by children's supersensitive antennae, of family poverty.”

“I've never understood why the knowledge training and rigorous testing of London cabbies isn't rolled out all over the U.K.”

“I grew up near London Zoo, with which I was obsessed. I would lie in bed at night, thinking about the lions and tigers and wolves that were prowling only a few miles away.”

“I am terrible at doing nothing. I'm not brilliant at doing one thing at a time, either. Ideally, I would fill out my tax return while watching a film; peel potatoes while reading the post; send emails in the bath.”

“Politics is a pure meritocracy. That's why Gordon Brown's cabinet had two brothers and a married couple in it. They just happened to be the best people around.”

“I do feel incredibly lucky to be making a living at things I love doing.”

“I don't know if I'm a writer who plays poker or a poker player who writes.”

“I like the fact that the weather forecast is always wrong. In a world of BlackBerry insta-connection, Google research, and Hadron Colliders, it is a daily reminder of the ultimate ignorance of man. It is a signpost towards all the enormous things we cannot understand.”

“I have a complicated relationship with the zoo; maybe everyone does. It's so wonderful and so sad.”

“It may be vain to care too much how you look, but it is impolite to care too little. You do a generous thing for the world when you present yourself properly.”

“I've never seen any 'Star Wars' movie.”