What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It's a sure thing! It's a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.

In fact, looking back, it seems to me that I was clueless until I was about 50-years-old.

I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.

I think you often have that sense when you write--that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.

Everybody dies. There's nothing you can do about it. Whether you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.

I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it.

A lot of college graduates approach me about becoming screenwriters. I tell them, 'Do not become a screenwriter, become a journalist,' because journalists go into worlds that are not their own. Kids who go to Hollywood write coming-of-age stories for their first scripts, about what happened to them when they were sixteen. Then they write the summer camp script. At the age of twenty-three they haven't produced anything, and that's the end of the career.