Helen Fielding Quotes & Sayings

Being a woman is worse than being a farmer there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturised, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, nails filed, cellulite massaged, stomach muscles exercised.
The whole performance is so highly tuned you only need to neglect it for a few days for the whole thing to go to seed. Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature - with a full beard and handlebar moustache on each shin Dennis Healey eyebrows face a graveyard of dead skin cells spots erupting long curly fingernails like Struwelpeter blind as bat and stupid runt of species as no contact lenses flabby body flobbering around. Ugh ugh. Is it any wonder girls have no confidence? — Helen Fielding

I like L.A. It's like a mini break. For a writer, it's hilarious. Like the food. Where I come from, we eat chip sandwiches: white bread, butter, tomato catsup and big fat french fries. It's delicious. Here, you order a creme caramel and the waiter says, 'You know, that contains dairy.' — Helen Fielding

You see, things being good has nothing to do with how you feel outside, it is all to do with how you are inside. — Helen Fielding

I will not be defeated by a bad man and an American stick insect ... instead I choose Chaka Khan ... and vodka ... Bridget Jones — Helen Fielding

The whole bloody world's got a commitment problem.
It's the three-minute culture. It's a global attention-span deficit. — Helen Fielding

Apparently the book says that at certain times in your life everything goes wrong and you don't know which way to turn and it is as if everywhere around you stainless steel doors are clamping shut like in Star Trek. What you have to do is be a heroine and stay brave, without sinking into drink or self-pity and everything will be OK. And that all the Greek myths and many successful movies are all about human beings facing difficult trials and not being wimps but holding hard and thus coming out on top. The — Helen Fielding

mascara-ing her eyelashes with her mouth wide open (necessity of open mouth during mascara application great unexplained mystery of nature). "Don't — Helen Fielding

The plans to lose weight and change personality kept me aloft for two days, only to collapse around my ears. I realize it was only a complicated form of
denial. — Helen Fielding

It is horrid to smirk. — Helen Fielding

The basis of my own addiction, I know, is my simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth. Tom says football guru Nick Hornby says in his book that men's obsession with football is not vicarious. The testosterone-crazed fans do not wish themselves on the pitch, claims Hornby, instead seeing their team as their chosen representatives, rather like parliament. That is precisely my feeling about Darcy and Elizabeth. They are my chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or, rather, courtship. I do not, however, wish to see any actual goals. I would hate to see Darcy and Elizabeth in bed, smoking a cigarette afterwards. That would be unnatural and wrong and I would quickly lose interest. — Helen Fielding

He picked me up in his arms, as if I was as light as a feather, which I am not, unless it was a very heavy feather, maybe from a giant prehistoric dinosaur-type bird ... — Helen Fielding

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

You can't be ironic about dead people. — Helen Fielding

You only get one life. I've just made a decision to change things a bit and spend what's left of mine looking after me for a change. — Helen Fielding

However, on glimpsing in shop window realized outfit insane. Now am on bus, remember also that corset-ike nature of dress is torture when sitting down. One's rolls of fat are squezzed together like dough being kneaded in a food processor. — Helen Fielding

Why does turning on a TV these days require three remotes with ninety buttons? Why? — Helen Fielding

The point is you are supposed to vote for the principle of the thing, not the itsy-bitsy detail about this percent and that percent. — Helen Fielding

I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull. — Helen Fielding

Backlash, actually, by Susan Faludi, — Helen Fielding

We've been texting for weeks. Surely it's rather like in Jane Austen's day when they did letter-writing for months and months and then just, like, immediately got married?'
'Bridget. Sleeping with a twenty-nine-year-old off Twitter on the second date is not "rather like Jane Austen's day". — Helen Fielding

Girls are so much nicer than men (apart from Tom-but homosexual). — Helen Fielding

Just ... in ... a meeting! How could I be in a meeting, and yet talking on the phone saying I'm in a meeting? People's assistants are meant to say they're in a meeting, not the person themself, who is supposed to be unable to say anything because they're in the meeting. — Helen Fielding

It was technological and black and thin and therefore Evil, but ... it was also a book. — Helen Fielding

So,' bellowed Cosmo, pouring me a drink. 'How's your love-life?'
Oh no. Why do they do this? Why? Maybe the Smug Marrieds only mix with other Smug Marrieds and don't know how to relate to individuals any more. Maybe they really do want to patronize us and make us feel like failed human beings. Or maybe they are in such a sexual rut they're thinking, 'There's a whole other world out there,' and hoping for vicarious thrills by getting us to tell them the roller-coaster details of our sex lives. — Helen Fielding

One minute you're closer to someone than anyone in the whole world, next minute they need only to say the words 'time apart', 'serious talk' or 'maybe you ... ' and you're never going to see them again and will have to spend the next six months having imaginary conversations in which they beg to come back, and bursting into tears at the sight of their toothbrush. — Helen Fielding

Weightless (in air), alcohol units 8 (but in-flight so canceled out by altitude), cigarettes 0 (desperate: no-smoking seat), calories 1 million (entirely made up of things would never have dreamt of putting in self's mouth were they not on in-flight tray), farts from traveling companion 38 (so far), variations in fart aroma 0. — Helen Fielding

Maybe will go to yoga and become more flexible. Or maybe will go out with friends and get plastered. — Helen Fielding

Roxster, my photo is of an egg. — Helen Fielding

It seems wrong and unfair that Christmas, with its stressful and unmanageable financial and emotional challenges, should first be forced upon one wholly against one's will, then rudely snatched away just when one is starting to get into it. Was really beginning to enjoy the feeling that normal service was suspended and it was OK to lie in bed as long as you want, put anything you fancy into your mouth, and drink alcohol whenever it should chance to pass your way, even in the mornings. Now suddenly we are all supposed to snap into self-discipline like lean teenage greyhounds. — Helen Fielding

Bridget Jones, wanton sex goddess, with a very bad man between her thighs ... Mum ... Hi. — Helen Fielding

The book also says that coping with difficult times is like being in a conical shell-shaped spiral and there is a point at each turn that is very painful and difficult. That is your particular problem or sore spot. When you are at the narrow, pointy end of the spiral you come back to that situation very often as the rotations are quite small. As you go round, you will go through the troubled time less and less frequently but still you must come back to it, so you shouldn't feel when it happens that you are back to square one. Trouble — Helen Fielding

The whole point of diaries is that other people find them and read what you've put. I did once take to writing my inner thoughts on the computer at the end of other things I was writing and ended up faxing four pages of hideous stuff to my accountant so I don't do that now. — Helen Fielding

Alcohol units: 5. Drowning sorrows. Cigarettes: 23. Fumigating sorrows. Calories: 3,856. Smothering sorrows in fat duvet. — Helen Fielding

On the night bus, I felt as though parts of other people were going into parts of me I didn't even know existed. I felt like I was being more intimate with members of the night-bus community than I'd ever been with anyone in my whole life. — Helen Fielding

It is proved by surveys that happiness does not come from love, wealth, or power but the pursuit of attainable goals. — Helen Fielding

Bad enough when a man wanted to touch but could only look. Worse yet when he'd touched and not even noticed. — Helen Fielding

HARHARBLOODY HAR. Put that in your pipe hole and smoke it, society! — Helen Fielding

Bridget. Sleeping with a twenty-nine year old off Twitter on the second date is not 'rather like in Jane Austen's day'. (Talitha) — Helen Fielding

She's a jellyfisher: You have a conversation with her that seems all nice and friendly, then you suddenly feel like you've been stung and you don't know where it came from. — Helen Fielding

I explained my whole theory about parenting being better if it was like a large Italian family having dinner under a tree while children play. Rebecca poured more wine and explained her theory of child-rearing, which is that you should behave as badly as possible so that the children will rebel against you and turn out like Saffron in Absolutely Fabulous. — Helen Fielding

We cannot avoid pain, we cannot avoid loss. Contentment comes from the ease and flexibility with which we move through change. — Helen Fielding

Sink into morbid, cynical reflection on how much romantic heartbreak is to do with ego and miffed pride rather than actual loss — Helen Fielding

No one is thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves, just like you. — Helen Fielding

It occurred to me that if Africa needed us, sometimes we needed Africa a great deal more. — Helen Fielding

I looked at him nonplussed. I realized that I have spent so many years being on a diet that the idea that you might actually need calories to survive has been completely wiped out of my consciousness. Have reached point where believe nutritional idea is to eat nothing at all, and that the only reason people eat is because they are so greedy they cannot stop themselves from breaking out and ruining their diets. — Helen Fielding

Reminded of favorite poem by Wendy Cope which goes:
At Christmas little children sing and merry bells jingle.
The cold winter air makes our hands and faces tingle.
And happy families go to church and cheerily they mingle,
And the whole business is unbelievably dreadful if you're single. — Helen Fielding

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. — Helen Fielding

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to. — Helen Fielding

I sat, head down, quivering furiously at their inferences of female sell-by dates and life as game of musical chairs where girls without a chair/man when the music stops/they pass thirty are 'out.'
Huh. As if. — Helen Fielding

But if you are single the last thing you want is your best friend forming a functional relationship with somebody else. — Helen Fielding

Decided to have a cappuccino and chocolate croissants on way to work to cheer self up. Do not care about figure. Is no point as no one loves or cares about me. — Helen Fielding

I am brave, though I am alone. — Helen Fielding

Emotional fuckwittage — Helen Fielding

I mean, I haven't rushed to the answerphone once to see if anyone's aware of my existence in the world! — Helen Fielding

Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature - with — Helen Fielding

I keep telling you, nobody wants legs like a stick insect. They want a bottom they can park in a bike in and balance a pint of beer on. — Helen Fielding

Work - once merely an annoying nuisance - has become an agonizing torture. — Helen Fielding

Junction nineteen! Una, she came off at Junction nineteen! You've added an hour to your journey before you even started. Come on, let's get you a drink. How's your love life, anyway?"
Oh GOD. Why can't married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask? We wouldn't rush up to THEM and roar, "How's your marriage going? Still having sex?" Everyone knows that dating in your thirties is not the happy-go-lucky free-for-it-all it was when you were twenty-two and that the honest answer is more likely to be, "Actually, last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little Angora crop-top, told me he was gay/a sex addict/a narcotic addict/a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo," than, "Super, thanks. — Helen Fielding

I know we're all psychotic, single and completely dysfunctional and it's all done over the phone,' Tom slurred sentimentally, 'but it's a bit like a family, isn't it? — Helen Fielding

One has to be in control, otherwise the whole dynamic becomes a total disaster. — Helen Fielding

The skin around my eyes was becoming, even as I watched, a mass of wrinkles; chin and jowls were sagging, neck like a turkey, marionette lines rushing from my mouth to my chin in manner of Angela Merkel. As I stared I could almost seamy hair turning into a tight grey perm. It had finally happened. I was an old lady. — Helen Fielding

I certainly think I'll end up writing about America in some form. I've taken plenty of notes. I like America very much. — Helen Fielding

Comedy tends to come out of things which are quite painful and serious. — Helen Fielding

When he's hot, he's hot; when he's not, he's not. But at least there is always food — Helen Fielding

Exes should never, never go out with or marry other people but should remain celibate to the end of their days in order to provide you with a mental fallback position. — Helen Fielding

I'm no good at anything. Not men. Not social skills. Not work. Nothing. — Helen Fielding

What is it about mothers and the phone which, immediately you say you have to go, makes them think of nineteen completely irrelevant things they have to tell you that minute? — Helen Fielding

Ugh. Would that Christmas could just be, without presents. It is just so stupid, everyone exhausting themselves, miserably haemorrhaging money on pointless items nobody wants: no longer tokens of love but angst-ridden solutions to problems. [...] What is the point of entire nation rushing round for six weeks in a bad mood preparing for utterly pointless Taste-of-Others exam which entire nation then fails and gets stuck with hideous unwanted merchandise as fallout? If gifts and cards were completely eradicated, then Christmas as pagan-style twinkly festival to distract from lengthy winter gloom would be lovely. But if government, religious bodies, parents, tradition, etc. insist on Christmas Gift Tax to ruin everything why not make it that everyone must go out and spend £500 on themselves then distribute the items among their relatives and friends to wrap up and give to them instead of this psychic-failure torment? — Helen Fielding

Just back from canal ride on bike. Went really well until someone threw an egg at me from a bridge. Or maybe it was a bird which went into sudden labour. Will clean off egg, not do Boris Bikes any more and go to Obesity Clinic on bus. At least will be alive and clean when sitting on arse instead of dead and covered in egg. — Helen Fielding

One must not live one's life through men but must be complete on oneself as a woman of substance. — Helen Fielding

Clearly in textbook terms, the gentleman should text the lady first after intercourse, but perhaps the whole socio-etiquettical system breaks down when an insect plague is involved. — Helen Fielding

I made my excuses and left, thinking, really, after a certain age, people are just going to do what they're going to do and you're either going to accept them as they are or you're not. — Helen Fielding

All got really plastered after that. Was completely fantastic evening. As Tom said, if Miss Havisham had had some jolly flatmates to take the piss out of her she would never have stayed so long in her wedding dress. — Helen Fielding

If we can't have comedy books written about aspects of womanhood without going into a panic attack about it, then we haven't got very far at being equal. — Helen Fielding

I'm fed up with you," I said furiously. "I told you quite specifically the first time you tried to undo my skirt that I am not into emotional fuckwittage. It was very bad to carry on flirting, sleep with me then not even follow it up with a phone call, and try to pretend the whole thing never happened. Did you just ask me to Prague to make sure you could still sleep with me if you wanted to as if we were on some sort of ladder?" "A — Helen Fielding

It's no good. When someone leaves you, apart from missing them, apart from the fact that the whole little world you've created together collapses, and that everything you see or do reminds you of them, the worst is the thought that they tried you out and, in the end, the whole sum of parts adds up to you got stamped REJECT by the one you love. — Helen Fielding

Call me old-fashioned, but I did read in Glamour that one's shorts should always be longer than one's vagina. — Helen Fielding

Went to Jude's party tonight in a tight little black dress to show off figure feeling v. full of myself ...
... There's nothing worse than people telling you you looked tired. They might as well have done with it and say you look like five kinds of shit. — Helen Fielding

Oh, God, I'm so lonely. An entire weekend streching ahead with no one to love or have fun with. Anyway, I don't care. I've got a lovely steamed ginger pudding from M&S to put in the microwave. — Helen Fielding

What about you, this week? First you completely ignore me like some Hitler Youth ice-maiden, then you turn into an irresistible sex kitten, looking at me over the computer with not so much 'come-to-bed' as just 'come' eyes, and now suddenly you're Jeremy Paxman." We — Helen Fielding

Age of rationing ended some time ago and is now space rather than possessions which is in short supply. — Helen Fielding

I like you very much. Just as you are. Mark Darcy, Bridget Jones — Helen Fielding

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

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. — Helen Fielding

Barometer of success in later life is not that they always win, but how they deal with failure. An ability to pick themselves up when they fall, retaining their optimism and sense of self, is a far greater predictor of future success than class position in Year 3. — Helen Fielding

I hadn't been there ten minutes before there were three turds on the carpet. — Helen Fielding

When someone loves you it's like having a blanket all round your heart ... — Helen Fielding

Singletons should not have to explain themselves all the time but should have an
accepted status - like geisha girls do — Helen Fielding

I always market research my books before I hand them in by showing them to five or six close friends who I trust to be honest with me, so they are very heavily re-written already. — Helen Fielding

E were always taught, instead of waiting to be swept off our feet, to 'expect little, forgive much'. — Helen Fielding

Why are bodies so difficult to manage? Why? 'Oh, oh, look at me, I'm a body, I'm going to splurge fat unless you, like, STARVE yourself and go to undignified TORTURE CENTRES and don't eat anything nice or get drunk.' Hate diet. — Helen Fielding

Oh God. valentine's Day tomorrow. Why? Why? Why is (the) entire world geared to make people not involved in romance feel stupid when everyone knows romance does not work anyway. Look at (the) royal family. Look at Mum and Dad. — Helen Fielding

I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage. — Helen Fielding

Am going to cook shepherd's pie for them all - British home cooking. — Helen Fielding

Would that Christmas could just be, without presents. It is just so stupid, everyone
exhausting themselves, miserably hemorrhaging money on pointless items nobody wants: no
longer tokens of love but angst-ridden solutions to problems. (Hmm. Though must admit, pretty bloody pleased to have new handbag.) What is the point of entire nation rushing round for six
weeks in a bad mood preparing for utterly pointless Taste-of-Others exam which entire nation then
fails and gets stuck with hideous unwanted merchandise as fallout? — Helen Fielding

When someone leaves you, apart from missing them, apart from the fact that the whole little world you've created together collapses, and that everything you see or do reminds you of them, the worst is the thought that they tried you out and, in the end, the whole sum of parts adds up to you got stamped REJECT by the one you love. How can you not be left with the personal confidence of a passed over British Rail sandwich? — Helen Fielding

That is such crap. How dare you be so fraudulently flirtatious, cowardly and dysfunctional? I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage. Goodbye. — Helen Fielding

Jude: Just as you are? Not thinner? Not cleverer? Not with slightly bigger breasts or slightly smaller nose?
Bridget: No.
Shazzer: Well, fuck me.
Tom: This is someone you hate right?
Bridget: Yes, yes, I hate him. — Helen Fielding

A woman has her needs. What good is a mother to her poor children if she's suffering from low self-esteem and sexual frustration? If you don't get laid soon, you will literally close up. More importantly, you will shrivel. And you will become bitter. — Helen Fielding

Is the whole world doomed to emotional trauma? — Helen Fielding