ALLISON PEARSON

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.

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.

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?'

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Endings are not my thing.

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.