As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Gre...

I am firmly of the opinion that women who make a lot of effort to hang onto their looks in middle age (unless they are beauties, entertainers or prostitutes) are rather sad, as one should surely have something more substantial to recommend one by this time, such as kindness or cleverness.

As a child, I wanted only two things - to be left alone to read my library books, and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there, I wanted to make loads of money.

Surely being a Professional Beauty - let alone an ageing one - is one of the most insecure and doomed careers imaginable.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

I'm a teenager, but I'm independent - I have my own apartment, I have my own life. And I think I have learned more than any of those teenagers have in school. I learned to be responsible, leaving my family and coming here alone.

I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.

Being a teenager is an amazing time and a hard time. It's when you make your best friends - I have girls who will never leave my heart and I still talk to. You get the best and the worst as a teen. You have the best friendships and the worst heartbreaks.

I fell in love with Erica Kane the summer before my freshman year of high school. Like all red-blooded teen American boys, I'd come home from water polo practice and eat a box of Entenmann's Pop'Ems donut holes in front of the TV while obsessively fawning over 'All My Children' and Erica, her clothes, and her narcissistic attitude.