Good olive oil, good butter, milk - they give food taste and depth and a richness that you cant reproduce with low-fat ingredients.

People who have fabulous childhoods have this sense that nothing is ever going to be that good again. With me, I have the sense that nothing is going to be that bad.

You don't go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be.

Everyone wants to be young, beautiful and rich. I don't say that scornfully: there are worse things to want to be. But that's why, for example, people don't begrudge Kate Moss how much she earns for a day's work but will fulminate over the take-home pay of some fat, old Water Board exec.

It sounds like something on a very trite T-shirt, but life is what happens.

Sometimes it's good just to be seduced by the particular cheeses spread out in front of you on a cheese counter.

I was a quiet teenager, introverted, full of angst.