How could you live without chips? I could do without bread easily.

As an Aussie, my favourite holidays are skiing ones.

I do think about how different my life might have been had my mother not died so young, but I try not to delve into it too deeply, as it's like 'Sliding Doors,' isn't it? You just don't know.

You have to control your own destiny and make your own choices.

The inspiration to cook came from my grandmother and my father who were both wonderful home cooks. But I would say I taught myself. You travel, you discover the world, you explore books - it is these things that make a great cook.

Sydney-siders don't drive.

I like to introduce people to new things without scaring them.

For the children it will always be a lemonade float at the Christmas table as a special treat.

In winter I love a pasty.

I'm pretty conscious of what I eat because of my age.

Vegetarian' is just another word for 'bad hunter.'

Fact is, I'm a carnivore.

I'm not someone who jumps in a car to make for the country, I'm an urbanite. I love living in London and there's always something going on.

I can't understand why anyone would want to reduce vinegar.

I already have my fantasy job. I run a restaurant and film 'MasterChef,' both of which mean I get to cook and eat - and get paid for it.

I don't think a 12-month TV campaign really changes what anyone thinks.

I love South Australia.

There's nothing worse than a sterile house.

I think the 'Great British Bake-Off' is great.

If I go to a restaurant the last thing I want to do is sit with somebody I don't like because then the food always tastes awful.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

We are most alive when we're in love.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.

Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

Gods don't answer letters.

When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.