“When you get past fifty, you have to decide whether to keep your face or your figure. I kept my face.”

People don’t roll around naked in my books. I do allow them to go to bed if they’re married, but it’s all very wonderful and the moon beams.

I would love to employ a man, but how can I possibly give a man dictation from the bath?

I have always found women difficult. I don’t really understand them. To begin with, few women tell the truth.

The great majority of people in England and America are modest, decent and pure-minded and the amount of virgins in the world today is stupendous.

Every man has been brought up with the idea that decent women don’t pop in and out of bed; he has always been told by his mother that “nice girls don’t.” He finds, of course, when he gets older that this may be untrue-but only in a certain section of society.

The right diet directs sexual energy into the parts that matter.

A historical romance is the only kind of book where chastity really counts.

I’ll keep going till my face falls off.

Every woman dreams of love. When she is young she prays she will find it. When she is middle aged she hopes for it and when she is old she remembers it.

Among men, sex sometimes results in intimacy; among women, intimacy sometimes results in sex.

You become what you think. You are what you eat.

I always wear boot polish on my eyelashes, because I am a very emotional person and it doesn’t run when I cry.

Good must triumph over evil. It usually does in life and in any case it’s bad for young people to believe it doesn’t.

To sleep around is absolutely wrong for a woman; it’s degrading and it completely ruins her personality. Sooner or later it will destroy all that is feminine and beautiful and idealistic in her.

The reason why Englishmen are the best husbands in the world is because they want to be faithful. A Frenchman or an Italian will wake up in the morning and wonder what girl he will meet. An Englishman wakes up and wonders what the cricket score is.

As long as the plots keep arriving from outer space, I’ll go on with my virgins.

Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit or talent.

He that has seen both sides of fifty has lived to little purpose if he has no other views of the world than he had when he was much younger.

I kind of liked all the creeping stuff [in Fifty Shades Darker], like when they’re sleeping and there’s me just standing behind the bed. It was great.

When I turned 50, I looked in the mirror and I thought: “Hey, this isn’t the dress rehearsal, this is life and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to have!”

Winston Churchill – fifty per cent genius, fifty per cent bloody fool.

In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.

For my part I prefer fifty thousand rifles to five million votes.

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.