On the whole, I prefer Christmas as an adult than I did as a child.

I never taste the wine first in restaurants, I just ask the waiter to pour.

At some stages of your life you will deal with things and at others you are overwhelmed with misery and anxiety.

You need a balance in life between dealing with what's going on inside and not being so absorbed in yourself that it takes over.

Also, in a funny way, if you have been happily married there are no unresolved areas, nothing to prove to yourself after the other dies.

I don't believe in low-fat cooking.

There is a kind of euphoria of grief, a degree of madness.

I can understand why those primitive desert people think a camera steals their soul. It is unnatural to see yourself from the outside.

Emotion is messy, contradictory... and true.

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

But if you know that something has been really vicious, you don't read it, you don't let it into your head. What's damaging is when sentences go through your head and you burn with the injustice of it.

The modern world is personal; people want to know intimate things.

Anyway, what makes people look youthful is the quality of their skin and I don't think you can change that.

I know the crew so well, so I forget I'm being filmed. It's like cooking with a friend in the kitchen - you're talking, as you do, and maybe you're telling her about this wonderful way to prepare lamb chops - it's more natural, more honest.

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.

Cooking is actually quite aggressive and controlling and sometimes, yes, there is an element of force-feeding going on.

And, in a funny way, each death is different and you mourn each death differently and each death brings back the death you mourned earlier and you get into a bit of a pile-up.

In England and America people tend to graze all day long, but I think it's such a waste to be constantly picking at food because you then can't enjoy a proper full meal when the time comes.

'Statistically, people who have been happily married and then widowed tend to remarry.

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

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

In fact I am quite snappy and irritable, and I don't know if I'd like to make myself worse in that respect.

I need to be frightened of things. I hate it, but I must need it, because it's what I do.

Then again, they're not scripted and I feel it's virtually impossible to be anything but yourself when you're in front of the cameras and cooking so there is a measure of truth in what you see.

I'm not someone who's endlessly patient and wonderful.

I wasn't good with authority, went to lots of schools, didn't like the fact that there was no autonomy.

Gordon Ramsay makes me laugh because he knows that I'm not a chef.

On the whole, I prefer Christmas as an adult than I did as a child.

There is something wrong about being photographed that has nothing to do with vanity.

There is a vast difference between how things seem from the outside and how they feel on the inside.

I am not sure about facelifts because I wouldn't want to be someone who just looks like she's had a facelift.

I never have plans for the future as you never know how things will turn out.

I think maybe when you live with someone who is really very ill for a long time, it somehow gives you more of a greedy appetite for life and maybe, yes, you are less measured in your behaviour than you would otherwise be.

I don't like conflict.

Cake baking has to be however innocently one of the great culinary scams it implies effort it implies domestic prowess but believe me its easy.

You need a balance in life between dealing with whats going on inside and not being so absorbed in yourself that it takes over.

Cooking is actually quite aggressive and controlling and sometimes yes there is an element of force feeding going on.

Emotion is messy contradictory... and true.

There is a kind of euphoria of grief a degree of madness.

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 dont go around grieving all the time but the grief is still there and always be.

...obesity isn't caused by those who adore food. People tend not to put on weight through eating meals. I'd say it's people who eat non-stop.

I get a little behind during Lent, but it comes out even at Christmas.

If you pray enough for things, I am proof that they can happen. I feel like a kid on Christmas day now, every day. It's something I have wanted for a long time and I am as happy as anyone to be here. It is great to be back at my first love.

When I was 12, all I wanted for Christmas was a trampoline or a four-wheeler. I ended up getting both presents for Christmas.

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

Next to a circus there ain't nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.