I used to have a bit of a thing against starting a meal with soup. I'd find they were often too heavy, filling you up rather than igniting the appetite. Plus, I'd end up mopping it up with scoops of baguette.

I think my heritage makes me very open to try things, taking on different flavours, mixing it all up. I find that exciting.

As a woman you have to tick all these boxes to be able to be on TV. I know I look a certain way and that's partly why I'm on TV. If I were really ugly and fat, I don't think I'd have had the same chance.

I'm always looking for a way to get some spice into my cooking but, generally, the French don't like spicy food.

It's great that Mary Berry got a primetime TV show, but I don't think there are enough women chefs on TV.

A whole trout is the ultimate Sunday table centrepiece to replace a hearty roast. It looks a little retro with the radish and cucumber scales, but this also adds freshness and acidity.

I love cheese. It intensified when I moved to France. It felt like my cheese shop lady was my dealer because every week I'd say, 'I need this cheese, I need that cheese', and she'd cut me enough for the week but I'd finish a whole piece in one go.

I'm not one for souvenirs though I do have a treasured yellow pot I bought at Maison d'Empereur in Marseille.

Pickled chillies are a must with wantan mee. I could eat a whole bowl of them - they're hot, salty, vinegary and sour all at the same time.

Sweden endured a potato famine like in Ireland and loads of people emigrated to the US.

I eat a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables not so much meat and fish. Baguettes and croissants are not an everyday food for me.

There's no point just telling the French that you can cook, the proof is in the pudding; if you bake them something delicious then you'll win them over.

Since Londoners started taking their burgers as seriously as the Americans do, discerning burger lovers have come out of the woodwork to judge every component from buns to pickles, patties to cheeses.

Whether it evokes pleasant memories of holidays in the Caribbean, or best-forgotten outings to Notting Hill, most of us have experienced jerk chicken in one form or another.

Whatever I do, whether it's cooking shows, books or events, the details count and that's what sets me apart from other food TV personalities. If you take out the details what's left?

Fika is a bit like afternoon tea but with coffee and pastries instead of sandwiches.

I don't like wasting food.

When one is the type of writer who cares about the meaning of the historically specific setting, the history itself is not something that I would call backdrop. It's not window dressing for a timeless relationship about love and betrayal. For me, the setting and the specific history are active co-agents with me in trying to form the novel.

Happiness is a mysterious concept. It seems to work best as futurity: at that point I will be happy, et cetera. I feel like I experience small pieces of joy day to day.

I don't think of myself as a gearhead or a motorcyclist. I'm not that young, and this is like another life of mine. But the people I know from that era think of me that way.

For me, art is not 'brooding.' It comes from someplace that is more fun and that has a kind of electricity to it.

Some writers think that fiction is the space of great neutrality where all humans share the same concerns, and we are all alike. I don't think so. I'm interested in class warfare because I think it's real.

Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

I think that when the social stakes for people are higher, how you present yourself may sometimes feel like it's going to inform your destiny. Because if other people regard you in a certain way, they'll want to help you, and you will end up having a career.

I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts.

I don't write listening to music, and in a way it seems silly that any writer should have to explain why not, as it's possibly no different from saying you don't eat gourmet dinners or play tennis while you're at the keyboard.

These women were taking over these former manufacturing warehouses in SoHo and figuring out a way to be fashionable and viable without money. It's hard to imagine a life like that in Manhattan now - there's something romantic about it.

I had always wanted to include images in a novel, and with my first book, 'Telex From Cuba,' I made an elaborate website that is basically all images.

I don't read for plot, a story 'about' this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening.

I know what it's like to go very fast on motorcycles. Those moments, they stay with you.

Citizenship and ethnicity can become, in certain contexts, restrictive, and perhaps that's one reason I was interested in people who feel compelled to mask their origins and thereby circumvent the restrictions.

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.

I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation, and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn't even have to mention them out loud to each other.

I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Celine, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. 'Ingrid Caven,' by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read 'Morvern Callar,' by Alan Warner, every year - I adored that book.

I write the novels that are possible for me to write, not that ones I think will come across in a certain light.

I got all my politics and culture and my sense of the great wide world of adults from 'Mad Magazine.' But all other comic books literally gave me a headache.

I think the art world heightens the intensity of desires for inclusion, and the humiliations of exclusion, which is why it's a great place to circulate when you are in the lucky position, as I am, of not wanting or needing anything from anyone.

In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don't want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer.

My dad had a Vincent Black Shadow, which was a quite particular thing: it was the fastest cycle of its era... It sparked a world for me; when I was old enough, I got a motorcycle.

I have to arrange my life very carefully. I need eight hours' sleep to work.

I like Baudelaire's sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.

Flamethrowers have been used by many armies in many wars, including by American Marines in Korea and Vietnam. They cause horrific deaths and are thus a serious public-relations liability. The U.S. military apparently phased them out in 1978.

Art breathes into life a surplus that is both vital and extraordinary.

Eventually, I grew out of my interest in motorcycles because they're quite dangerous. I don't ride them anymore. But I have this history.

I spent ten years riding motorcycles.

'Blood Meridian' was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer.

It's no secret that Cuba is a typical Latin American culture in that it has a fair amount of homophobia. Homosexuals have been notoriously persecuted under Fidel's government.

I don't believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing exactly that produces a useful sorting mechanism in our society in order to separate children into categories of promising and doomed. The tests seem arbitrary and without real scientific value and yet have lasting consequences.