I do feel incredibly lucky to be making a living at things I love doing.
— Victoria Coren Mitchell
I can be a bit weird, cross when I'm cross, tired when I'm tired, and hungry when I'm hungry.
I tried doing yoga to see if it would make me a more patient person, but I lost interest after about six minutes.
I won a prize for 'best sponge cake' at the Clacton Festival 2005. Having said that, I was only up against three other cakes.
I'm familiar with that magical mindset during sporting competition where one feels completely zoned in on what's happening. There are occasional nights in poker when the mists have cleared, and I just know what my opponents' cards are. Everything at the table is slow, loud, and easy. The rest of the world is silent.
My own, purely personal view is that reading, study, poetry, and scientific experiment might be more rewarding than a job or children, so I would never advise anyone against university if they're going for the right reasons.
Ed Miliband should be out and proud about his abstruse interests, his Master's in Economics, his political obsession, his prioritising of the mental over the physical.
After a bath, we all love to dry off with a towel. But do we need it to survive? No. It's a luxury.
The truth is, I feel sorry for the Old Etonians. Everybody should be judged on his or her own merits. Assuming that toffs are 'out of touch' is more modern and fashionable than assuming they have a 'natural fitness for government,' but it's no fairer.
I was never, in my whole school career, given a job as a monitor, a form captain, or a prefect. I never won any kind of prize.
If you are actually ordinary, the only way to give royal status meaning is to live an extraordinary life. It can't be jeans and burgers and granny doing the babysitting.
Socks and sandals together are absolutely fine, as long as your flares are wide enough to cover your feet.
Weight gain is good because it makes your dresses tight. This is not necessarily classy or flattering, but it means you don't have to iron anything.
I am a big fan of Bournemouth, having enjoyed many happy hours on its sandy beach and crazy golf course.
The idea of MPs texting and emailing through debates makes my gorge rise, as it does when a minicab driver makes phone calls at the wheel. I'm not paying you to keep in touch with your mates!
The best thing about universal free school meals is that they would remove one of the embarrassing signals, easily picked up by children's supersensitive antennae, of family poverty.
People have become desperate to reduce everything, including each other, to mindless categories of good and bad, as if the world can be divided into Facebook likes and dislikes.
I remember I had a copy of 'David Copperfield' that I lugged around at primary school. I started reading it when I was seven, and I was eight when I finished it. I read an awful lot as a little girl and played games and imagined lots of things.
My 'Only Connect' personality isn't put on: it's definitely me.
I'd like to be more decisive. I can take an hour to choose between two brands of washing powder in the supermarket.
The older you get, the more 'mindfulness' becomes about trying to remember why you came upstairs.
Insomniacs will be familiar with that disastrous moment as you lie there in the dark, with your eyes shut, when you think, 'What does my brain actually have to do to make me become asleep? What is the difference between that state and this? Why is the weird, invisible change not happening tonight?'
Society is notoriously stupid in its failure to harness the wisdom of older women in everything from television to politics, family life to boardrooms, and here is one reminiscing with honesty and realism about women's particular challenge: to create our professional and financial structures in the same period as our peak fertility.
Everyone likes a pair of comfy shoes. But is this an automatic right? Comfy shoes are clearly not allowed at the Oscars, for example. Why should criminals enjoy a treat that is denied to our favourite actresses? All prisoners, male and female, should be obliged to wear high heels. This would also make them easier to catch during riots.
I know that I'm probably far more pedestrian and less talented than many who dreamed of becoming writers but couldn't see the road so easily.
Politics is a pure meritocracy. That's why Gordon Brown's cabinet had two brothers and a married couple in it. They just happened to be the best people around.
I was a sporadically bossy child.
Anger at the wealth gap is no longer about dukes in horse-drawn carriages; it's about vast, tax-dodging corporations. This will not be assuaged by seeing the royal family claiming to live like we do. If anything, that will make us angrier.
We all look stupid in patterned tights.
You will enjoy the TV and radio forecast much more if you stop taking it as advice and simply treat it as a short poem about the weather.
I've always hated the idea of carrying grudges and resentments around like a load of mouldy suitcases.
I had an instinct to take my husband's name when I got married. It felt like a romantic statement of pride, love, and permanence and of doing what's always been done in my family.
Given the choice, the majority of children wouldn't go to school at all. The whole thing's ghastly.
In 'The Pianist,' Polanski transformed his ghastly knowledge of the camps into an act of artistic self-expression.
When I was at school, I loved maths and read lots of books and was horrified at the idea of having a boyfriend... I was probably a nerd, but then, it was a negative term.
I'm too short-sighted, too squeamish for contact lenses and too vain for glasses.
When I was 15, I still liked climbing trees and hiding in cupboards.
Many poker players swear by sleeping a certain number of hours before a tournament, going to the gym in the morning, and 'clearing the mind.' Juggling two jobs alongside my chosen game, I never have time and am invariably sending work emails from my iPhone between hands.
I've never understood why the knowledge training and rigorous testing of London cabbies isn't rolled out all over the U.K.
I'm really bored by the constant vilifying of people (especially women) for things they didn't say.
Pudding is not a human right.
Many moneyed children grow up with no drive at all.
I'm no longer bossy in the honest sense; I've mastered (mistressed) the art of passive-aggression.
Seeking to ban things is as bossy as you can get.
The millions who watch 'Downton Abbey' do so neither relating to the Granthams nor hating them. It's an amused enjoyment of spectacle.
It is impossible to identify a nice scent from within the chemical cloud of a perfume department.
I like the fact that the weather forecast is always wrong. In a world of BlackBerry insta-connection, Google research, and Hadron Colliders, it is a daily reminder of the ultimate ignorance of man. It is a signpost towards all the enormous things we cannot understand.
Anyone who's tuned in to the House of Commons TV coverage knows the benches are often empty. I like that. I'm a big fan of political transparency. It's good for us to know which debates the MPs consider important enough to show up for, and which not.
Half the point of education is to build peer groups and social bonds.
Given the choice, I'm sure the majority of children would rather have a packed lunch than school meals.
