By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.

I love to make pies - pot pies, quiches, savory tarts, fruit pies. I use an old-fashioned pastry blender with wires and a wooden handle. I never use a recipe.

One of mom's greatest acts of generosity was that she trained me to be defiant. Her great gift to me was encouraging me to be the person that I wanted to be, not the one that she and my father wished I was.

I have to admit I've never had a Fruit Loop.

Sharing food has always had a central place in civilized societies; it's no accident that so many of our cultural, religious and patriotic rituals are involved with eating.

Ask people to pitch in - hand them a spoon and ask them to stir. Doing things together, having everyone help, makes for a nicer party.

If you have caviar, the way to eat it is by the spoonful. Don't combine it with shrimp, pomegranate seeds and huitlacoche.

If you really taste a doughnut, it's pretty disgusting. They taste of grease.

A real woman is someone who knows what she wants. If you want to stay home, that's fine, but you have to be clear-eyed.

If we make it national policy that we will support small farmers the way we support agribusiness, we'll suddenly see it change in terms of the cost of organic food.

The first time you make something, follow the recipe, then figure out how to tailor it to your own tastes.

The secret to life is finding joy in ordinary things. I'm interested in happiness.

I'm not a big turkey fan, but my husband loves it. Thanksgiving is his favorite meal.

It was through cooking food and sharing it with each other that our ancestors learned how to become social animals.

To me, cooking is man's natural activity. But I think writing is really hard. Certainly writing fiction is the hardest thing I've ever done.

Hunger, I discovered, is very much a matter of the mind, and as I began to study my own appetites, I saw that my teenage craving had not really been for food. That ravenous desire had been a yearning for love, attention, appreciation. Food had merely been my substitute.

Anyone who has ever been an ugly adolescent - and we are legion - knows that the feeling of being unlovely and unlovable never goes away; it is always there, lurking just beneath the surface.

In really good times, you say, 'No, I'm not taking that ad.' But in bad times, you'll take anything.

You look at the Barefoot Contessa or Lydia Bastianich, and it's just like watching your mother cooking.

If you're going to tell stuff, you might as well tell the real stuff.

Let's face it: my life tends to revolve around food, and I love feeding people.

I came from a family where, you know, we sat down at the table every night, and you better have a story to tell. My father never wrote his stories down. And you know, I learned that they went farther if you wrote them down.

Some magazines are run from the top down, where the editor-in-chief decides what every article is going to be and who's going to write them, and then they're doled out. My idea is to do it the opposite way, to do it from the bottom up.

What I like best is the challenge of learning something I didn't know how to do, going beyond my comfort level.