With age comes a greater wisdom, an ease and comfort with oneself.

Be yourself - it's the inner beauty that counts. You are your own best friend, the key to your own happiness, and as soon as you understand that - and it takes a few heartbreaks - you can be happy.

It's a bit of a headache being a perfectionist. You're never satisfied.

To keep my back from getting stiff, I have a strict regime every morning of stretching and do yoga once a week and Pilates. 'Strictly Come Dancing' in 2008 was great for my fitness.

War is good for absolutely nothing, because no matter how far and wide apart we may live, we're all the same under the skin. We all want to live, laugh and love.

I'm a romantic and will only marry for love where there's respect and compatibility. I'd like to be with someone if the right person came along. I really like male company. I like the male mind.

I have done so many love scenes in the past that I have learned how to pull off a sexy smoulder on the dance floor.

I've never felt the need to be defined by a man.

I am simply not such a slave to my vanity, and I don't want to be, because as you get older you really have to start accepting the inevitable.

Sadly, the timing's never been right. There have been men who would have married me but I didn't feel the same, and vice versa.

Whitley Bay was my first experience of the seaside. I'd buy my bucket and spade, and beach ball, and all the shops were teeming with toys. I used to spend hours on the shuggy boats.

There’s no snobbery like that of the poor toward one another.

Like Desserts, books come in all kinds of tasty treats!

Maybe you are a pig and don't even know it.

There's in my mind a... turbulent moon-ridden girl or old woman, or both, dressed in opals and rags, feathers and torn taffeta, who knows strange songs but she is not kind.

She's sun and rain, she's fire and ice, a little crazy, but it's nice. And when she gets mad, you best leave her alone, cause she'll rage like a river then she'll beg you to forgive her.

The soul yearns to fly home on the wings of love to the world of ideas. It longs to be freed from the chains of the body.

I don't consider myself a divining rod whom God is speaking through or any kind of crap like that.

Talking about spirituality is like talking about new love - it always sounds kooky to those who aren't experiencing it.

Is this a proposal? I'm married now, you know.

Unfortunately, nature seems unaware of our intellectual need for convenience and unity, and very often takes delight in complication and diversity.