I learned basic cookery from my mom, taught myself cake techniques and then got fed up with my own cakes not looking as good as the ones in the shops.

It makes me upset, if not angry, when people assume that there can be no morality without a religious framework. If there's a moral framework without all that religious stuff, it's more valuable.

I swim more or less every day.

I try to be classic without being mumsy.

I've never particularly liked the idea of looking back; I'd rather look forward

I look at myself objectively and in a way I see myself as a commodity. Your name becomes somehow outside yourself. Now, when I'm at home being Mrs. Scarfe, that's when I'm most myself.

I know some actresses who used to be older than me who are now younger than me - I don't know how they do it.

I think one wants lots of different lives.

I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve.

We get a lot of overseas people wanting to order cakes.

Listening to my regular favourites - Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and so on - I always feel, quite misguidedly, that nothing can be too bad if such beauty and brilliance exists in the world.

Laughter and prayer are the two noblest habits of man

Racism is not funny, because it won't solve anything, but making it worst instead, because racism is the reason the world is no longer great.

Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.

My dream role would be anything where I get to tap-dance.

Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time.

Liberal papers are not necessarily liberal.

People realise that his promise [Tony Blair's] to 'save the NHS' was just talk.

It's crucial that I kind of keep up, without drifting into the backslapping land of cliche and lifetime achievement awards.

Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.

The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.