“The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.”

“This is one rule about mixing boys and girls: that a date always comes first.”

“To arrive at sex, you first have to undo the zip of the girl's dress. And between zip and sex lay a process in which twenty- maybe thirty- subtle decisions and judgements had to be made”

“Look, girls and boys are different. Girls like to be touched twenty times a day in a nonsexual way to feel good about themselves - that is why I tickle you and link arms with you - but boys think about sex, snogging and football, and also snogging whilst playing football. Simple.”

“When a boy's first romantic interlude is with Phoebe the Dog-Faced Girl, he feels a need to get out into the world and find a new life.”

“My theory was that if you had breasts, boys wanted to have sex with you, which wasn't exactly a big compliment, since they wanted to have sex any way. Whereas if you had a beautiful face, like Julia, boys fell in love with you, which seemed to happen against their will. Then the sex that you had would be about love.”