Take no notice of anyone you don’t respect. […] Take no notice of anyone with a ­gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.

We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

What I'm not willing to accept is the enduring status quo around maternity. I asked Nike to contractually guarantee that I wouldn't be punished if I didn't perform at my best in the months surrounding childbirth. I wanted to set a new standard. If I, one of Nike's most widely marketed athletes, couldn't secure these protections, who could?

No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working. […] No going to London. […] No going anywhere else either.

I still regularly read New Scientist to try to keep up with quantum theory and cosmological discoveries and so forth. And I read National Geographic—that’s not a plug.

"The love you take is equal to the love you make" – Lennon/McCartney.

My own snoring.

Absence of lower back pain.

During my Queensland childhood, on the days when I avoided the chlorine-infused shower gauntlet and being corralled into the deep end of the school pool.

I was a dishwasher in Paris and a hospital orderly in London. But I did anything that was going.