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!

The divorce has lasted way longer than the marriage, but finally it's over. Enough about that. The point is that for a long time, the fact that I was divorced was the most important thing about me. And now it's not.

If your husband is cheating on you with a carhop, get Meryl Streep to play you. You'll feel much better.

There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to, and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye. In the 1950's only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all.

Food is one of my favourite things. Though I certainly know lots of people who happen to be happily married who don't have food play the role in it that it plays in my life. And I don't know how they do it, and frankly I feel so bad for them because I just love food and one of my favourite things is asking, "What do we want for dinner? What do we feel like eating?" That wonderful negotiation that goes on several times a week about what "we" feel like.

I recognize that printing pictures of corpses raises all sorts of problems about taste and titillation and sensationalism; the fact is, however, that people die. Death happens to be one of life's main events. And it is irresponsible and more than that, inaccurate, for newspapers to fail to show it.

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.