“I am a person. I am not a soap opera. There is never going to be a next [tabloid] installment about my life because my own stuff is my own stuff.”

Ultimately, you just have one life. You never know unless you try. And you never get anywhere unless you ask.

Many roads to take some to joy some to heart ache

Life is short, and it is here to be lived.

I do think it’s important for young women to know that magazine covers are retouched. People don’t really look like that.

I look like people that walk down the street. I don’t have perfect boobs, I don’t have zero cellulite – of course I don’t – and I’m curvy. If that is something that makes women feel empowered in any way, that’s great.

I don’t have parts of my body that I hate or would like to trade for somebody else’s or wish I could surgically adjust into some fantasy version of what they are.

I am insecure. If you ask me, everybody is.

I still don’t believe this craziness for being skinny, but I eat sensibly and I don’t stuff down chocolate biscuits.

I was the kid who never won the races. I never jumped the highest. I wasn’t on the list of the high-achieving.

I accept my body. I accept how I am and make the best of what I am given.

Mum and dad were very much friends, and up to life. There was no anxiety for anything when I was growing up, they just taught me to be me.

I’m often moved by the circumstances around some of my characters, but I don’t think I’ve actually cried watching myself.

There are moments to indulge and enjoy, but I always know when it’s time to go home and wash my knickers.

Of course I believe in marriage. Commitment to one other person in life is glorious.

Regret isn’t good. Every decision one makes in life is made for a reason or another. Whenever something bad happens, I go, ‘This is happening for a reason’, or, ‘This is going to teach me something’.

I feel very strongly that curves are natural, womanly and real. I shall continue to hope that women are able to believe in themselves for who they are inside, and not feel under such incredible pressure to be unnaturally thin.

Blanche: No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

Our hearts are the shrine; that is where God should be installed. Our good thoughts are the flowers to worship Him. Good deeds form the worship, good words form the hymns and love forms the offering.

A tyrant institutionalises stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.

I installed a skylight in my apartment, the people who live above me are furious!