I feel like I run a business although I haven't one. It's planning, planning, and planning.

My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.

I didn't have any confidence in my beauty when I was young. I felt like a character actress, and I still do.

That consciousness of quality, and the need to demand it can galvanize your energies, not just in your work, but in a rigorous exercise of mind and heart in every aspect of your life.

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.

Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men.

When my children were very young and I was working I had someone cooking for me. I don't have a cook now, I haven't had one for a number of years and I do it myself. But when they were all little it was hard to pay attention to everyone's homework at the end of the day and make dinner.