Helen Fielding

"I think that if you're not a fan of irony as a form of expression, then a book that contains the line, "There's nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism" is going to make you cross. I also think that if we can't have a comic female character, if we can't laugh at ourselves without having a panic attack about what it says about women, we haven't got very far with our equality."

"I never imagined it would last more than a few weeks. I didn’t tell any of my colleagues it was me who was writing Bridget. I was working alongside a lot of very clever, seasoned journalists who were writing about New Labour and Chechnya and I felt stupid writing about calories and alcohol units and why it takes three hours between waking up and leaving the house in the morning, Then we started getting letters praising the column, I started boasting, "It's by me, meeeee!" and things snowballed from there."

"The jokes in Bridget come from something quite painful, which was her perception that she was in her thirties and she'd somehow made a mistake by not getting married yet and there's this ticking clock. But also there were good reasons why she was still single."

"I really wanted to smash the idea with this movie that there's a sexual sell-by-date for women and not for men, and stick it to the awful cougar stereotype. It makes me think of a woman in animal print leering over a friend of my son's, going, "Do you want a sherry, darling?" [...] It's got to stop because it's really not reflecting what's happening. For years and years we've seen Hollywood show men 40 years older than their partners, and it's not even discussed. Now movies are finally exploring a desire between younger men and older women that's reciprocal, not transactional. Bridget and Roxster both see something they want in each other — and Bridget having sex and being sexy is to be celebrated."