"I am a massive slag!" I think to myself, in a motivational way. "I'm a Lady Sex Adventuress! I'm a Pirate of Privates! I'm a swashfuckler!" ... I think of "Teenage Whore" by Courtney Love as my personal anthem."

"A library is such a potent symbol of a town's values: each one closed down might as well be six thousand stickers plastered over every available surface, reading "WE CHOSE TO BECOME MORE STUPID AND DULL."

"Women wear heels because they think they make their legs look thinner."

"And the question is always "When are you going to have kids?" Rather than "Do you want to have kids?"

"Your hard-won triumphs can be wholly negated if you live in a climate where your victories are seen as threatening, incorrect, distasteful, or -- most crucially of all, for a teenage girl -- simply uncool. Few girls would choose to be right -- right, down into their clever, brilliant bones -- but lonely."

"If you take a moment to consider the state of the world, the thing you notice is that there are plenty of babies being born; the planet doesn't really need all of us to produce more babies."

"I have a rule for working out if the root problem of something is, in fact, sexism. And it is this: asking 'Are the boys doing it? Are the boys having to worry about this stuff? Are the boys the centre of a gigantic global debate on this subject?"

"When a woman walks into a room, her outfit is the first thing she says, before she even opens her mouth. Women are judged on what they wear in a way men would find incomprehensible."

"Lines and greyness are nature's way of telling you not to fuck with someone - the equivalent of yellow and black lines on a wasp, or the markings on the back of a black widow spider."

"And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end."

"Because I haven't yet learned the simplest and most important thing of all: the world is difficult, and we are all breakable. So just be kind."

"David Cameron is a C-3P0 made of ham."

"Please wait for me. Don't have all the fun now. Don't fill up on other people who aren't me. Don't ruin your appetite."

"Not one had ever passed judgement on my cheap handbag to my face. But then, this is a reserved country."

"A self-made man" - not of woman born but alchemized, through sheer force of will, by the man himself. This is what I want to be. I want to be a self-made woman. I want to conjure myself out of every sparkling, fast moving thing I can see. I want to be the creator of myself. I'm going to begat myself."

"Men and women alike have convinced themselves of a dragging belief: that somehow women are incomplete without having children."

"Motherhood is a game you must enter with as much energy, willingness, and happiness as possible."

"I never wanted to be famous. It was amusing at first, but now I hate it. I just wanted to be respected by people I respect. And I wanted to be rich. It's best to get rich, then you can do what you want."

"I'm so glad I spent 10 years being sad and lonely."

"Sitting in seat 14A, in the sun, I float on a full-moon, tidal joy unlike anything I've ever experienced. I am getting incredibly high on a single, astounding fact: that it's always sunny above the clouds. Always. That every day on Earth- every day I have ever had- was secretly sunny after all....I feel like I've just flown 600 miles per hour head-on into the most beautiful metaphor of my life: If you fly high enough, if you get above the clouds, it's never-ending summer."

"You can always tell when a woman is with the wrong man, because she has so much to say about the fact that nothing's happening."

"But when women are asked when they're going to have children, there is, in actually, another darker, more pertinent question lying underneath it."

"I hate that tabloid idea of anybody who is famous having to forfeit their privacy."

"Always believe you can change the world " even if it's only a tiny bit, because every tiny bit needed someone who changed it."

"The scabs feel like I have a message on my arm. Something that needs to be read, urgently, by someone. It was only years later that I realized the person I had written that message to- the person who wasn't listening- was me. I was the one who should have been staring at that arm, and working out what the red hieroglyphics meant. Had I translated them, I would have realized those red lines read: 'Never feel this bad again. Never come back to this place, where only a knife will do. Live a gentle and kind life. Don't do things that make you want to hurt yourself. Whatever you do, every day, remember this- then steer away from here."

"For a woman, every outfit is a hopeful spell, cast to influence the outcome of the day. An act of trying to predict your fate, like looking at your horoscope."

"Between 60 and 80 percent of strippers come from a background of sexual abuse."

"Any action a woman engages in from a spirit of joy, and within a similarly safe and joyous environment, falls within the city-walls of feminism. A girl has a right to dance how she wants, when her favourite record comes on."

"Hearing women singing about themselves - rather than men singing about women - makes everything seem wonderfully clear, and possible."

"Women's bodies do not give up their babies so easily, and so silently, is the message. The heart will always remember."

"The aphorism "If you want something done, ask a busy woman" is in direct acknowledgment of the efficiency boot camp parenthood puts you through."

"In the end, I go where I always go when I need information on something baffling, poisonous, or terrifying: the library."

"The idea that I might not-- in an earlier era, or a different country-- have a choice in the matter seems both emotionally and physically barbaric."

"Personally, I feel the time has come for women to introduce their own Zero Tolerance policy on the Broken Window issues in our lives - I want a Zero Tolerance policy on "All the Patriarchal Bullshit."

"The word 'spinster' tells you everything you need to know about our attitude of women who choose not to marry."

"But I am, personally, not a gambler. I wouldn't spend £1 on the lottery, let alone take a punt on a pregnancy. The stakes are far, far too high. I can't agree with a society that would force me to bet on how much I could love under duress."

"When young people are cynical, and snarky, they shoot down their own future. When you keep saying "No," all that's left is what other people said "Yes" to before you were born. Really, "No" is no choice at all."

"We're supposed to speak from the heart in what we wear. We have to find capsule wardrobes."

"Galaxies of nothing are going onin her eyes."

"Strip clubs let everyone down. Men and women approach their very worst here."

"It's difficult to see the glass ceiling because it's made of glass. Virtually invisible. What we need is for more birds to fly above it and shit all over it, so we can see it properly."

"Parents drinking is the reason you came into the world, and if we didn't keep doing it then, by God, it would be the reason you went back out of it."

"Every woman who chooses - joyfully, thoughtfully, calmly, of their own free will and desire - not to have a child does womankind a massive favour in the long term. We need more women who are allowed to prove their worth as people; rather than being assessed merely for their potential to create new people. After all, half those new people we go on to create are also women - presumably themselves to be judged, in their futures, for not making new people. And so it will go on and on..."

"I am eating this noise like mouthfuls of freezing, glittering fog. I am filling with it. I am using it as energy. Because what you are, as a teenager, is a small, silver, empty rocket. And you use loud music as fuel, and then the information in books as maps and coordinates, to tell you where you're going."

"Keith Richards is a man without regret. When I ask him if-given the chance to do it all over again-he'd start taking heroin, he doesn't pause. "Oh yes. Yes. There was a lot of experience in there-you meet a lot of weird people, different takes on life that you're not going to find if you don't go there. I loved a good high. And if you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses, because they're asleep. There's songs zooming around everywhere. There's songs zooming through here right now, in the air."

"For throughout history, you can read the stories of women who - against all the odds - got being a woman right, but ended up being compromised, unhappy, hobbled or ruined, because all around them, society was still wrong. Show a girl a pioneering hero - Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc - and you also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed."

"I want a Zero Tolerance policy on All The Patriarchal Bullshit."

"You stop talking about things when you've worked them out. You're no longer an observer but a participant. You're too busy for this bullshit."

"Because this injunction for all women to have children isn't in any way logical. If you take a moment to consider the state of the world, the thing you notice is that there are plenty of babies being born; the planet really doesn't need all of us to produce more babies."

"Two women at the same event wearing the same outfit is a disaster. But two women at the same event singing the same song is a party. And two women at the same event talking about Doris from Fame is a friendship for life. Fill yourself with words, choruses, and heroes, like you're supposed to fill your wardrobe with shoes, brooches, and belts."