Sally Phillips

“Bad impulse buys make you feel grim, don't they? It's like having consumer Tourette's. I gravitate towards austere foreign-language film DVDs when insecure.”

“My first film crush was Mark Lester as Oliver Twist in the Carol Reed film.”

“Middle-aged women on telly is a bit of a hot topic - before, we were 27 to 37, and now we're 40 to 50. You do notice as you get older... you go past 35, and suddenly you're playing baddies.”

“I've got spider veins all over my legs, so I wear opaque tights all winter. All sorts of colours.”

“The children break all my jewelry, so everything I wear is cheap - from Topshop or Dorothy Perkins.”

“I always carry a pair of scissors around with me to cut things out of magazines.”

“My blood runs cold when I hear the 'great news' that we have found a marker for the Down's syndrome gene, which means we can identify it more easily. Why is that good news? It's only good ne...”

“My mother always worked and thought staying at home was a bit twee, and that you should get your act together and do something useful. Now I think that's the most useful thing you can do: br...”

“As a writer myself, my job has very often been to also write on the job. So you get the script and a vague idea of how the scene might work, and you then add funny words or change the script...”