Quotes

Were the awfulness of Big Top (2009) rendered into miles, we could use it as a bridge to the Moon.

At 35, my breasts are still like peaches. But the kind of peaches you find in the bottom of your handbag, after you'd forgotten you put them there for a snack. Peaches that have the obvious indentation mark of your keys on one end, and a bus ticket stuck to the sticky bit. The kind of peaches you'd look at doubtfully in a market, 10 for a quid, and say 'I suppose I could make smoothies out of them'.

I will never diss my feminist forebears because I can see why they were angry. If you just make what you think is right look cool, then you don't need to convince anybody. I see feminism as a massive party. It's cool, the idea that 50% of the population can now start doing things and having fun and experimenting with their hair and makeup.

[on her hair style] It dates back when I was twelve and enormously fat, and I thought I could either lose weight, which would make my body look smaller, or I could make my hair look bigger which would make my body look smaller by comparison.

[on becoming a woman] It's like being in the Girl Guides. You have to get your walking-in-heels badge, your working-out-what-eyebrows-you're-going- to-have badge.

I very much doubt that we would have had civil partnerships and then gay marriage for gay people in this country without Russell T. Davies, particularly for Queer as Folk (1999) and Doctor Who (2005), because at a point where your children and your grandchildren are in the playground pretending to be a bisexual superhero, Captain Jack, and you're having gay kisses on prime time television, you suddenly look a bit weird to go, "Well, these people can't marry". Your kids have got their head around it.

[on David Bowie's appearance on Top of the Pops (1964) in 1972] That was like the gay moon landing. That was where suddenly, being gay, people knew what it was, it outraged the older generation, the younger generation were going, yes, that's it, that's how I feel.

Bowie specialised in moments; the most aching, perfect, precision, moments. Has a better love-lyric ever been written than the simple, "I absolutely love you?" in "Absolute Beginners". Millions have written a million more words, he did it in four.

I come from like a rock and pop background and it's very noticeable that kind of like all the way through the eighties and up until the mid-nineties, women wore clothes, but the fact is now that Adele is the only person who's wearing a sleeved dress in the 21st century and everybody else is Rihanna and Christina Aguilera. It's all about one kind of sexuality.

I like Youporn. I think it's a good role model for the sexually naive. Most porn is junk sex, made on an industrial scale, in porn factories. What I think we all need is ethical, homemade, organic porn. Real porn. Slow porn. The kind of porn Jamie Oliver would make a programme about.

The Utopians have won, time after time. We went from an apartheid South Africa to one that was ruled by Nelson Mandela, we invented David Bowie, we put a man on the moon.

I am, by and large, boundlessly positive. I have all the joyful ebullience of a retard.

I thought I looked like a demented harpy in the [Eddie] Izzard pictures. I looked worse than the tranny. Story of my life.

I wrote 'How to Be a Woman,' not 'How to Be ALL Women.' I would never presume to speak for 3.3 billion women. There is no 'one voice of feminism.' There is no 'one voice' of anything.

Here is the quick way of working out if you're a feminist. Put your hand in your pants. a) Do you have a vagina? And b) Do you want to be in charge of it? If you said 'yes' to both, then congratulations! You're a feminist.

What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy, and smug they might be. Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course 'you' are.