My dad makes food with very few delicate flavours.

Pasta with melted cheese is the one thing I could eat over and over again.

Brunch, for me, is an extended breakfast that should be enjoyed whenever you have time properly to engage in cooking and eating.

A well-made salad must have a certain uniformity; it should make perfect sense for those ingredients to share a bowl.

The combination of olive oil, garlic and lemon juice lifts the spirits in winter.

Breakfast is always the best time for something juicy, sweet and fresh - it just feels like the right way to open the day. There's no right way, though, when it comes to choosing the fruit.

Mothers and grandmothers: these are the people that I admire most, not so much chefs.

Just-poached vegetables show off their natural attributes, and taste fresh and light in a way you never get with roasting or frying.

Date syrup is a natural sweetener that has wonderful richness and treacly depth; I drizzle it over semolina porridge.

The way to entice people into cooking is to cook delicious things.

For me, the end of childhood came when the number of candles on my birthday cake no longer reflected my age, around 19 or 20. From then on, each candle came to represent an entire decade.

Power is a game, and in games you do not judge your opponents by their intentions but by the effects of their actions.

Follow me down, Alice Faye Dahl. I know the way.

Dishonesty is like a boomerang. Just when you think all is well, it hits you in the back of your head.

I think true success is intrinsic... It's love. It's kindness. It's community.

I don't hate America. I love America. I want it to be better. The only way we can get it to be better is to realistically criticize what's wrong with it.

There is a peculiarity in the countenance, as everybody knows, which, though it cannot be described, is sure to betray the Englishman.

There's nothing terribly wrong with The November Man in a serviceable late-night cable TV sort of way but neither is there anything terribly right about it. It's unnecessary and derivative.

No two electrons in the same state? That is why atoms are so unnecessarily big, and why metal and stone are so bulky.

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.

And as we stray further from love, we multiply the words. Had we remained together we could have become a silence.