It's rather fun writing a female spy, because she has so much more kit. Bond never carried a hair dryer or a makeup bag. And he certainly didn't wear an uplift bra.

Women today are bombarded with so many messages, like we should have Naomi Campbell's body and Madeleine Albright's career.

There are so many images pushed at women and so many ideas of what you're supposed to be. I think there's too much of this superwoman, this woman with a bottom like two billiard balls. There's no real celebration of just being a person.

Nobody wants to be racist and I think that most people aren't.

I've always been a natural singer on stage and in the studio - never had a vocal lesson in my life.

It is true that I have been studying both humility and pride for many years for the purpose of weakening pride in my own life and cultivating humility by the grace of God.

I sometimes wish I had been educated a Catholic, in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles. Are they necessarily inseparable? Is man really so much of a philosopher, that he can conceive of truth in its abstract purity, and divest life and the affections of all the aids of the imagination?

It's jarring to go from one amazing experience to another that feels ordinary. I don't quite know how to explain it. You see the uniqueness of what you've been doing, and disassociating yourself from it and going back to the 'normal' life is tough.