Top 49 Quotes & Sayings by Allison Pearson

I am a passionate devotee of the Howard Hawks' screwball comedies of the 1930s and the 1940s, where I think that the relations between men and women were at their civilized height in terms of banter and exchange of wit and equality.

Women now influence the majority of consumer purchases. It is women's votes that will secure victory at the next election, hence the altogether delicious spectacle of Messrs Brown and Cameron vying to tell stories about broken nights and childcare as men once boasted of goals scored or pheasants bagged.

I'm not a writer just to be a writer. I want to say something that really needs expressing.

My mother was a stay-at-home mom until I was about 11, when she got a job - and it was like a light came on inside her. It's not wrong to be passionate about your career. When you love what you do, you bring that stimulation back to your family.

It's not easy to reach the summit of your career by the age of 24 - and for the years after to be a humiliating scrabble downhill.

I speak as the journalist who, on the first day back at work for 'The Daily Telegraph' after the birth of my daughter, went to interview Tom Hanks with an epaulette of banana sick on my jacket.

When we talk about women's struggle to balance their lives, certain men growl, 'If you can't stand the heat, get back to the kitchen.' Men who have never changed a nappy, mainly, and couldn't pick their child's teacher out in a police line-up.

My child was one of Nature's Tories pitted against a mother who was one of nurture's Lefties: it was no contest.

Girls slightly younger tended to be Donny Osmond girls or Michael Jackson girls, but for my generation, it tended to be David Cassidy.

When you have kids, there's a tendency to put the marriage stew on the back burner and give it a quick stir now and then. But it's important to remember why you had children with this person.

It is customary for the writer to sneer that Hollywood has traduced their book. Well, I adore my film.

Women run the small country called Home, millions of us do it in our spare time, and no one who doesn't run that small country really knows what it feels like in the dead of night when task lists jitter like tickertape through your seething brain.

We carry our younger selves with us our whole lives, and we can measure out of lives by music we've loved or icons we've loved.

My ideals told me that men and women could both go out to work and be truly equal. My children told me something more complicated, something I really didn't want to hear. Their need for me was like the need for water or light: it had a devastating simplicity to it.

Going through puberty, that Cape Canaveral of the hormones, young girls are in love with the idea of being in love, trying it out for sighs.

For centuries, the question of men needing to comprehend women simply didn't arise. Men were valued according to how they measured up to the manly virtues.

My son was about five or six months old, and he was ill, and I was sent to New York to interview three people back to back. I got home, and I saw my baby. He had been very ill, and he was on three kinds of antibiotics. I'd been away for eight days. I looked at him and thought, 'What am I doing? I'm a terrible mother and a terrible journalist.'

I don't believe for a minute that women really want to be understood by men.

Sometimes it's a relief just to focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

I have an American trainer - a bubbly Californian. I tell her, 'Welsh women don't run. We're congenitally incapable.' But she's got me up to five kilometers.

My husband is old-fashioned and kind, he does the greatest Sinatra impression, and I'd never have written anything if he hadn't read all those bedtime stories and unloaded the dishwasher while I slaved over chapters.

One thing that did give me pause for thought, when I told my female friends now that I was writing about a 13-year-old girl, without exception they all said, 'I would not go back to being 13 for a million pounds.'

Working mothers' laughter comes hardest when our double life is revealed for what it is: a juggling act in which the balls can drop at any time, invariably on our own head.

I'm interested in the things that might seem slight or amusing but which I feel have a kind of profundity.

The software program for motherhood is impossible to fully download into the male brain. You give them two tasks and they're like, 'I have to change the baby and get the dry cleaning?'

I've struggled with depression, and the signs that I was falling apart - having heart palpitations at 4 A.M. - were there for a long time before I paid attention. Even when my psychiatrist gave me a questionnaire, I found myself trying to circle the answers that made me seem like I wasn't a wreck. I've since learned to listen to my body.

Every so often, you come across a member of the younger generation who makes you think, 'Well, perhaps the future's going to be OK after all.'

Endings are not my thing.

My strong sense now is that, as women have become more equal in society, so their depictions onscreen have become lamer and lamer and lamer, to the point that it's an embarrassment.

If I had written a book saying, 'Ladies, your life is terrible,' I would have sold three copies. It's always better to laugh people into recognition.

Oh, where is the Fairy Godmother of explanations when you need her?

You learned that if you're tired enough, you can sleep sitting up. That the unendurable is perfectly endurable if you just take it a minute at a time, and when the alternative is no more minutes ever.

When you're young your mother shields you from the world because she thinks you're too young to understand, and when she's old you shield her because she's too old to understand - or to have any more understanding inflicted upon her. The curve of life goes: want to know, know, don't want to know.

The best musicians answer something in you when you don't even know the question.

In death, we are not defined by what we did or who we were but by what we meant to others. How well we loved and were loved in return.

People say that time is a great healer. Which people? What are they talking about? I think some feelings you experience in your life are written in indelible ink and the best you can hope for is that they fade a little over the years.

Anyone suffering Downton Abbey withdrawal symptoms will find an instant tonic.

The quickest way to stop noticing something may be to buy it, just as the quickest way to stop appreciating a person may be to marry them.

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.

No man would ever use both hands to hold a cup of tea, unless he was one day's march from the South Pole, with one chum dead in the snow, dogs all eaten and six fingers about to drop off. And even then he would look around the empty tent to check, in case anybody thought it was girly.

God probably thinks it’s worth giving a sense of humor only to those of us who have to laugh at all the rubbish bits that are wrong with us.

The great thing about unrequited love is it's the only kind that lasts.

I forget the derivation of Boxing Day, but the feeling of wanting to invite your loved ones outside one at a time and punch them in the face, does that come into it somewhere?

Children are the proof we've been here . . . they're where we go to when we die. They're the best thing and the most impossible thing, but there's nothing else . . . Life is a riddle and they are the answer. If there's any answer, it has to be them.

The times you don't make it are the ones children remember, not the times you do.

Can't is for pussies.

Men worry about childcare with their wallets, women feel it in their wombs.

A father is the template of a man Nature gives a girl

A mother of a one-year-old boy is a movie star in a world without critics.