I was brought up in the countryside in Ireland and would go bonkers if I couldn't escape the city. I like to wake and hear birds tweeting, not the low drone of traffic.

As for tweeting and texting: impassioned discussions, particularly when they're intimate, don't work in abbreviated script messages. No relationship should begin or end in 140 characters.

I would go out with people who really didn't like me very much and then wonder why we weren't getting married!

One of my few childhood memories is as an eight-year-old, refused permission to watch the Hitchcock season on Irish television, sneakily viewing 'The Birds' though a crack in the living-room door. It transformed my hitherto perfectly enjoyable half-mile walk to school, down a country lane patrolled by watchful birds, into a terrifying ordeal.

It's so much easier to count our disadvantages than tot up the mitigating circumstances that generally outweigh the despair.

I have a very childish attitude to books - a very non-analytic enthusiasm... like Alice falling down the chute.