If you don’t want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won’t have to work.

The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.

Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.

Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave when they think that their children are naive.

I have an idea that the phrase “weaker sex” was coined by some woman to disarm the man she was preparing to overwhelm.

Some pains are physical, and some pains are mental, but the one that's both is dental.

Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.

To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the wedding cup, whenever you're wrong, admit it; whenever you're right, shut up.

A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.

Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, And that's what parents were created for.

Tonight’s December thirty-first, Something is about to burst. The clock is crouching, dark and small, Like a time bomb in the hall. Hark, it's midnight, children dear. Duck! Here comes another year!

Everyone wants to be young, beautiful and rich. I don't say that scornfully: there are worse things to want to be. But that's why, for example, people don't begrudge Kate Moss how much she earns for a day's work but will fulminate over the take-home pay of some fat, old Water Board exec.

It's true that I wouldn't have written the first book had my sister and mother been alive. It was my way of continuing our conversation. It's also this Jewish thing of naming and remembering people, and I think there is a sense of keeping that side of life going.

I think sometimes that people assume because I'm on television I'm an expert, but I think the whole point of what I do is that I'm not and I don't have any training. My approach isn't about a fancy ingredient or style. I cook what I love to eat.

But I do think that women who spend all their lives on a diet probably have a miserable sex life: if your body is the enemy, how can you relax and take pleasure? Everything is about control, rather than relaxing, about holding everything in.

I think we all live in a world that is so fast-paced, it's threatening and absolutely saturated with change and novelty and insecurity. Therefore, the ritual of cooking and feeding my family and friends, whoever drops in, is what makes me feel that I'm in a universe that is contained.

I was brought up an atheist and have always remained so. But at no time was I led to believe that morality was unimportant or that good and bad did not exist. I believe passionately in the need to distinguish between right and wrong and am somewhat confounded by being told I need God, Jesus or a clergyman to help me to do so.

...That Great Cocktail Cabinet in the Sky...

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

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

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

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

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.

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