Arabella Weir Quotes

Both Plockton and the Isle of Muck in north-west Scotland are incredibly beautiful. Sadly, Plockton has been discovered by tourists because it's where they shot Hamish Macbeth.

If one's honest about it, spending time in a car with children is pretty ghastly.

If there's one thing I know, it's this - everybody thinks somebody else is having a better life.

Statistically, if you have ever dieted you are extremely likely not only to regain any weight you lose, but to go on to gain even more. Dieting makes you fat.

If no one saw - it didn't count. It's only when you eat in front of strangers or people that make you feel guilty that food is really fattening.

Call me an over anxious, middle-class mum, but my eight-and-a-half-year old son looks very much, to me, like he's headed for a life of crime.

The real me now may not be thin but she's got the cake and, if she likes, can eat it too.

If, however, you have richer pursuits in mind and know that no woman should be judged by how she looks - that everything she brings to the party is more important than the size of her arse - then refuse to be sucked into the never ending whirligig of self-doubting, self-hating madness that is stop-start dieting and crazy new exercise regimes.

I met Tom Baker doing a voice-over when David [Arabella's friend, David Tennant] wasn't at all well known. We were doing this voice-over together and I said to Tom, 'Oh, my friend's a really, really big Doctor Who fan,' and he replied, 'Wait!' He got his cheque book out and asked, 'What his name?' I said 'David Tennant'. He wrote, 'To David Tennant, seventeen pounds forty five', signed it and I asked him what it meant. He said, 'He'll know'

My mother, father, stepmother and surrogate mother have all died of cancer; my best friend has got terminal cancer and at least five of my other friends have had cancer but survived it.

I have never done a package tour in my life. It appeals in a way, but then I remind myself that you can't control the other people with you, which could turn out to be ghastly.

I don't subscribe to the 'Doctor Who' magazine and we've only got the normal amount of 'Doctor Who' fridge magnets.

Despotism isn't nearly as bad as it's cracked up to be.

My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don't have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don't have children who are overweight.

When popularity is your only goal, doing well in class is going to feature very low, if at all, on your priority list.

I cry at everything, even the length of the queue at Sainsbury's.

I spent my entire childhood living abroad because of my father's occupation, so we were on long-haul flights all the time.

My dad was a diplomat and after living in America, where I was born, he was posted to Cairo.

There is so much that is positive, wonderful even, about state schools. At a state school your kids will learn to live alongside and appreciate other kids from many diverse and different cultures.

If you have any power at all from being popular, then you have a duty to help people out.

I'm the co-chair of the PTA at my kids' school, Ashmount Primary, in north Islington, London.

I was accorded the opportunity to learn by failing - albeit at the cost of a few honourable teachers' sanity - and now I realise what a rare and incredible luxury that is.

Success, in whatever form it takes, is a tricky thing - once you've achieved your goal, then what? Where do you aim?

The crushing, pitiful, and frequently just plain risible pathos of an unsuccessful actor/performer's life is well charted.

If I'm hunting down gifts, I like to buy locally.