Top 80 Helen Fielding Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “No one is thinking about you. They’re thinking about themselves, just like you.”

— Helen Fielding

2. “It is proved by surveys that happiness does not come from love, wealth, or power but the pursuit of attainable goals.”

— Helen Fielding

3. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.”

— Helen Fielding

4. “One must not live one’s life through men but must be complete on oneself as a woman of substance.”

— Helen Fielding

5. “When someone loves you it’s like having a blanket all round your heart...”

— Helen Fielding

6. “I am brave, though I am alone.”

— Helen Fielding

7. “I will not Drink more than fourteen alcohol units a week.”

— Helen Fielding

8. “Sink into morbid, cynical reflection on how much romantic heartbreak is to do with ego and miffed pride rather than actual loss.”

— Helen Fielding

Featured in: Romance Quotes

9. “I will not get upset over men, but instead be poised and cool ice-queen.”

— Helen Fielding

10. “Can officially confirm that the way to a man’s heart these days is not through beauty, food, sex, or alluringness of character, but merely the ability to seem not very interested in him.”

— Helen Fielding

11. “Oh God, what’s wrong with me? Why does nothing ever work out?”

— Helen Fielding

12. “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

13. “I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage.”

— Helen Fielding

14. “Tom has a theory that homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural bonding: both being accustomed to disappointing their parents and being treated as freaks by society.”

— Helen Fielding

15. “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

Featured in: Fun Quotes

16. “Everything’s just so good now, because, as Dad says, ‘It’s coming from the inside, not the outside.”

— Helen Fielding

17. “Women today are bombarded with so many messages, like we should have Naomi Campbell’s body and Madeleine Albright’s career.”

— Helen Fielding

18. “You’ll never get a boyfriend if you look like you wandered out of Auschwitz.”

— Helen Fielding

19. “I will not fall for any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobics, people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists, megalomanics, chauvists, emotional fuckwits or freeloaders, perverts.”

— Helen Fielding

20. “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

21. “I will not sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend.”

— Helen Fielding

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

— Helen Fielding

23. “Don’t say ‘what,’ say ‘pardon,’ darling, and do as your mother tells you.”

— Helen Fielding

24. “Valentine’s Day purely commercial, cynical enterprise, anyway. Matter of supreme indifference to me.”

— Helen Fielding

25. “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

26. “I am a child of Cosmopolitan culture, have been traumatized by supermodels and too many quizzes and know that neither my personality nor my body is up to it if left to its own devices. I can’t take the pressure.”

— Helen Fielding

27. “It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It’s like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting “Cathy” and banging your head against a tree.”

— Helen Fielding

28. “What a blessing to be born with such Sloaney arrogance. Perpetua could be the size of a Renault Espace and not give it a thought.”

— Helen Fielding

29. “I’m no good at anything. Not men. Not social skills. Not work. Nothing.”

— Helen Fielding

30. “In the end there is nothing more unattractive to men than radical feminism.”

— Helen Fielding

31. “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

32. “I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second.”

— Helen Fielding

33. “Wise people will say Daniel should like me just as I am, but I am a child of Cosmopolitan culture, have been traumatized by supermodels and too many quizzes and know that neither my personality nor my body is up to it if left to its own devices. I can’t take the pressure. I am going to cancel and spend the evening eating doughnuts in a cardigan with egg on it.”

— Helen Fielding

34. “Our culture is too obsessed with outward appearance, age and status. Love is what matters.”

— Helen Fielding

35. “It is horrid to smirk.”

— Helen Fielding

36. “As women glide from their twenties to thirties, Shazzer argues, the balance of power subtly shifts. Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve, wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian.”

— Helen Fielding

37. “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 ideal 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

38. “Am going to cook shepherd’s pie for them all – British home cooking.”

— Helen Fielding

39. “But if you are single the last thing you want is your best friend forming a functional relationship with somebody else.”

— Helen Fielding

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “Oh, darling, you can’t go around with that tatty green canvas thing. You look like some sort of Mary Poppins person who’s fallen on hard times.”

— Helen Fielding

44. “I come from Yorkshire in England where we like to eat chip sandwiches – white bread, butter, tomato ketchup and big fat french fries cooked in beef dripping.”

— Helen Fielding

45. “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

46. “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

47. “Eventually, I manage to cheer Mum up by allowing her to go through my wardrobe and criticize all my clothes...”

— Helen Fielding

48. “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

49. “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

50. “I realize it has become too easy to find a diet to fit in with whatever you happen to feel like eating and that diets are not there to be picked and mixed but picked and stuck to, which is exactly what I shall begin to do once I’ve eaten this chocolate croissant.”

— Helen Fielding