I've been making a lot of pasta. It's easy. There are unusual tastes that you can combine. I cook because my kids like a certain kind of thing and then they want it over and over.

No one has ever asked an actor, 'You're playing a strong-minded man.' We assume that men are strong-minded, or have opinions. But a strong-minded woman is a different animal.

We are who we're going to be when we're very old, and when we're very old we are who we were when we were 8.

I've grown up well, partly because there weren't great girls' literature - Nancy Drew, maybe - but there weren't things. So there was Huck Finn and "Spin And Marty." The boys characters were interesting and you lived through them when you're watching it.

Well my favorite is really really sharp, extra sharp, aged cheddar cheese.

We don't like to talk about that in America, but there are classes in America. And she [Julia Child] was of a class of women who were wealthy, privately educated, went to Smith, moved in that sort of circle. She was conscripted into the OSS, which is the early CIA, which was all filled with Yalies and Princeton and Harvard people and a few women who were typing mostly but also had something to do.

There is some liberation in the freedom of being totally alone and really going for it.