Top 60 Mariella Frostrup Quotes

Having a baby is a disaster for your career. I don’t think there’s any sympathy.

With longer life spans and better health and education, many feel that giving birth to a baby a mere couple of decades after they themselves were in the cradle is a little premature.

Since so many romantic comedies vary little in their storyline, the success or failure of such movies depends largely on whether we believe in the relationship of the protagonists.

Every friendship goes through ups and downs. Dysfunctional patterns set in; external situations cause internal friction; you grow apart and then bounce back together.

Translating any insights I have for strangers’ lives into positive action in my own has proved a challenge. While I’ve learned a lot about what everyone else is thinking, I fail miserably to use such knowledge in my private relationships.

For many, long-term friendships, rather than family ties, are the foundations for sustainable lives.

Far too many girls’ and women’s romantic relationships are formed around a negation of their own worth and attributes rather than a confirmation of them.

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

The sight of parents, children and grandparents all descending on a tented field to enjoy the pleasure of ideas and books renews my faith in humanity.

As a species, we tend to be doers, forever shaping and reshaping the world to better suit our purposes.

We inhabit a world where we’re taught that we can have what we desire, and tend to act on it – the least we can do is admit to it when we succumb to our instincts.

I met Jason on a charity walk in 2001, and we got married on a friend’s boat in Panama two years later. It was the perfect wedding for two people who’d already been married and who weren’t teenagers.

Men that aren’t threatened by opinionated, faintly aggressive women are in a minority.

Loneliness and rootlessness are just symptoms of an insecurity that assails us all when hitting this midlife moment. The world appears intent on blanking you out.

I used to go out with someone who was a really great diver, and we used to go to all the great dive spots all over the globe – although I would spend most of my time crying because I was often too scared to go into the water. But once I was in the water, I loved it.

I used to routinely turn down things that might compound the impression that I was some kind of vacuous blonde. But now, when I look back, I think I should have done them because I would be very rich – being taken seriously isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I have a producer friend who despairs that I come across as rather frosty and never show the real me, and she might have a point.

Life is rife with frustrations, jealousies and, on occasion, an overwhelming sense of its injustices, but it’s a big mistake to let such negative sentiments rule our lives and dictate choices.

Too often we forget that an ideal partner is someone who enhances an already full existence.

In person, George Clooney lives up to all your expectations.

Television executives only commission something that somebody else has already commissioned that’s doing well on another station – they’re afraid of expecting an audience to concentrate for longer than three minutes on any particular item.

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

If I ever write a book, it will be called ‘Bottle Blonde.’

I love physical books, can’t bear to throw them away, and am drowning under the weight of my collection, but I do a lot of my work reading now on my iPad.

The idea of exposing the British public to the full breadth of my personality isn’t a good one.

For most of us, when our ‘dreams’ – I use the word with reservations – came true, and marriage and motherhood became a reality, the romcoms, like horoscopes, swiftly lost their allure.

In romance, we feel the need to zoom in and expound on our partner’s foibles in intimate detail; in friendship, we tend to do the opposite, avoiding confrontation through fear, lethargy or both.

The more brutal it gets in the working world, the more appealing the prospect of having someone at home creating a sanctuary becomes. Increasingly couples, particularly with children, are making that tough choice, with one or other partner electing to embrace domestic duties while the other brings home the cash.

Sustaining true friendship is a lot more challenging than we give it credit for.

You only need to look at Jane Austen to see how crossed wires can become a defining aspect of romantic life. Then again, if the course of true love ran more smoothly, it would have a terribly detrimental effect on our cache of love stories.

We’re naturally programmed to endure a muddle of emotions as we leave childhood behind.

Girls have a tendency to take responsibility for romantic misinterpretations, when often it’s men whose perfectly honed emotional inscrutability makes life more complicated than it should be.

Every adult has the right to choose who they wish to spend their lives with, and we’re all capable of making mistakes, but no one escapes with their self-regard intact.

I recognise my old self in a lot of the letters I get from single women who are unrealistic about what they want.

The point of the feminist movement wasn’t simply to set our underwear on fire and muscle into small spaces in the male-dominated workplace, but to create a world where the contribution of both sexes was equally valued and no one’s worth was judged on their take-home salary.

Placing ‘amicable’ and ‘separation’ together creates an oxymoron – we don’t usually decide to end a partnership until the very sight of our soon-to-be ex fills us with disgust, misery, agony or a combination of all three.

Having lived a full and stimulating life before I had my kids, I’ve relished every minute I’ve had to spend with them and felt a degree of confidence in dealing with their trials and tribulations to date.

I love my children, but I don’t really want to talk about them. I’m not that much of a freakish middle-aged mother, I’m just very lucky, and there isn’t much more to say. I’d like not to be constantly expected to be a spokesman for things that are part of the natural rhythm of a woman’s life.

Of course, I’d like to earn Jonathan Ross’s money, but I don’t have sleepless nights wondering when someone’s going to knock on my door with sacks of cash.

Fridays are always movie night at our flat in Kensington, West London.

For many young women, the dream of independence and a home of their own is a tantalising goal, while a lifetime devoted solely to catering for another person’s needs would be hard to countenance.

Joy acts like a trampoline, everything that touches it bouncing right back off it.

Emotions are products of our mind, and we can actually train ourselves to choose whether we banish or embrace them.

Nothing can prepare you for the all-consuming nature of motherhood, and I am very aware of my good fortune, as I spent years fretting about whether I’d ever meet anyone to have a baby with.

It’s an absolute disgrace that there isn’t a books programme on the BBC.

Writers want to talk. They can’t wait to tell you what they’ve been thinking. And because they’ve been in solitude, they’ve had some fairly decent thoughts.

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.

With the Internet, we can communicate instantly across the globe, but the net also makes it possible for us to shrink ever further into our own skins – a state of being that neither suits the human temperament nor provides ground for further growth.

Had Elizabeth Bennet known how wildly Darcy’s heart beat for her, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ would barely have made it into a short story. Their torturously slow-burning romance is a classic example of how men and women still struggle to communicate the most basic of emotions.

Men want children later, but women can’t rely on being able to. So I’m all for scientific advances and the help they can give people.

We invest less in our friendships and expect more of friends than any other relationship. We spend days working out where to book for a romantic dinner, weeks wondering how to celebrate a partner or parent’s birthday, and seconds forgetting a friend’s important anniversary.

Seeing the world differently is one of the toughest incompatibilities to reconcile in a relationship.

From Mozambique to Chad, South Africa and Liberia, Sierra Leone to Burkina Faso, feminism is the buzzword for a generation of women determined to change the course of the future for themselves and their families.

Kids are like glue: they can bond together, unlikely companions, even when there is little else left to maintain the connection.

There are two ways of approaching your time on this planet: one is to sit around waiting for something to happen that will make sense of your existence, and the other is to get out there and find purpose for yourself.