When I started, you had cochineal food colouring that would turn things pink, but you could never make it red. Now, red is no problem - and if you look at supermarket bakery sections since 'Bake Off' began, you can get everything.

I have no burning ambitions, and I can honestly say the thing I love most is 'Bake Off.' That will always come first.

I still think it's essential for a parent to cook with their children. Weighing out the ingredients and learning where the food comes from is educational, but it also helps to place meal times at the heart of family life. We never had dinner in front of the TV.

I was rather hopeless at school, but the one subject I seemed to be good at was domestic science.

Lots of people have written to say 'Bake Off' has inspired them to bake with their children. I feel proud about that; it's exactly what I used to do with mine.

I won't do 'Strictly' or any of those ghastly reality programmes. 'I'm a Celebrity' would be the end. It makes me shudder.

As parents are usually working, they haven't time to teach children about cooking, and it's a wilderness. They should be given healthy recipes - some standbys so that when they leave home, they don't live on junk.

Dad thought something very fishy was going on when, at 22, I was offered a job for £1,000 a year - more than Dad paid his own staff - for inventing cheese recipes and writing leaflets at the Dutch Dairy Bureau in London.

I don't go to fancy Michelin-starred restaurants often.

It helps to have a happy home life to keep up alongside your career.

My husband is not in the slightest bit domesticated, but as the years go, by he's getting better. He can make an excellent omelette.

When I thought I couldn't write recipes, my boss at the time advised, 'Write as you talk.'

I eat carefully because people don't want to see a large person judging cakes. They'll think to themselves, 'That's what happens when you eat cake.'

Many people think children must have chips. I don't think any household should have a deep fat fryer.

To be able to walk out the door when you come home from a job and wander into the garden to do a bit of watering gives you time to be creative in your mind.

I can't pass a plant stall without feeling I must have one. But my greatest extravagance, I suppose, is roses. We've got masses.

It is something you can't predict, and it is the huge sadness in your life, losing a child.

A lot of other reality shows on television can be bullying and aggressive, but we wanted 'The Bake Off' to be an antidote to that.

I'm immensely proud to have been made a CBE, but I don't ever use the letters after my name unless someone has included them in correspondence.

Wherever possible, I like to use home-grown or locally produced ingredients.

When you see validation for a life's work and dedication, it's a beautiful day.

I have such a good life. It's something I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams.

I got interviewed by one writer who started with the line, 'Mary Gauthier is a woman who clearly doesn't care how she looks.' I do too. It's just that I'm not very good at it.

Songs, especially lyrics, have always been really important to me.

I got sober at 27 and started writing around 30 and started playing music in public around 32, 33.

I knew I had that Cajun heritage, that Acadian heritage; I just feel it. And my gut says Irish on the other side. Irish and French, that's what I feel. When you're young, it doesn't matter so much, but as you get older, I would suspect part of the ageing process is to wonder about your ancestors - who were they? What were their lives like?

I think Bob Dylan showed us that songs can rise to the level of literature, and he proved it over and over again. That's why they keep trying to get him a Nobel Prize for literature: because there is no Nobel Prize for songwriting.

I think music is the highest form of healing.

If somebody in a family is in service, the whole family is in service. I didn't know that. I didn't know our veterans were being deployed seven, eight, nine, 10 times. It's inhumane.

There's a universal inside of me. So if I tell my story, you're going to see parts of your story in it. I don't know which parts, but we all overlap. We're all very much alike.

There's an ocean of misunderstanding. It's called the civilian-military divide. I had a lot to learn about our military - who they are, what burdens they carry.

Music had always been a kind of anchor for me. But I didn't write my first song till I was 35.

The belief when your mother gives you away is that there's something deeply wrong. Mothers don't give babies away. There's something wrong with me, something unlovable, something seriously flawed in me. It's a fundamental thing; it's precognitive. You feel it rather than think it. How could you not?

I don't really write for catharsis; I get that kind of work done in therapy.

The world doesn't need any more pretty good songs.

I've learned our soldiers are so much like everybody else. They're just put into an extreme situation.

A song is an emotional lightning bolt - a good one, anyway.

Fundamentally, our job as songwriters is to sit down and listen.

When I first got sober, I hadn't read anything for six or seven years. I didn't have even that much focus.

I don't ever want to tie a song in a little bow. Life doesn't work that way, and war doesn't ever work that way.

People in Ireland take in the whole song. After a long history of great singers and songwriters and poets, they are able to consume the entire song - not just the external; they go inside.

I have got my story. Adoptees rarely get our stories. We only know what we are told. I don't even have my story, really. My mother won't tell me. She won't tell me who my father is. She won't tell me the story of my birth.

A lot of time, if you spend too much time in Nashville, songwriters get caught up in charts and numbers and the music business politics.

It is a form of arrogance to assume that other people are even thinking about you.

I learn something every time I go to work with a veteran. Every single time.

People who have been through trauma, their souls are hurting.

I think it's a stereotype that soldiers don't talk, because my experience is that they will talk if they are met with empathy and no judgment.

What I really like is this salted calamari - with jalapenos on top.

I did not know that if a member of a family serves, the whole family serves. I did not know that the spouses of our service members carry such a heavy load.

Songs bring us into connection with each other. When they resonate, when we're in resonance, singing together, we become one for that 3 1/2 or four minutes the song lasts. It takes away that isolated loneliness that modern life is so full of.