It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your 'portrayal' of women. Even when I started out on 'The Office' eight years ago we could write our male characters funny and flawed but not the women. And now thankfully it's completely different.

The part which American friendship played in helping us to win the freedom we enjoy in this part of Ireland has been gratefully recognized and acknowledged by our people.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

If governments let themselves be fully bound by the decisions of their parliaments without protecting their own freedom to act a breakup of Europe would be a more probable outcome than deeper integration.

As our federal government has grown too large and too powerful the real loss has been the freedom of people to govern their own lives and participate fully in the American dream.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

I have an impressionable palate. A well-worded menu or beautifully presented dish excites me. I get a great deal of pleasure just thinking about food.

Hopefully imparting what's important to me respect for the food and that information about the purveyors people will realize that for a restaurant to be good so many pieces have to come together.

It's my first presenting role so I'll be nervous but it's going to be great fun. I can't wait to sample the food and meet the celebrities. Hopefully I can inject some of my own glamour.

If you think of what food is it's the energy we use to do our daily work. I want people to know about the USDA. This is a very important department. It's not fully appreciated as such.

Freedom must be gained step by step slowly. Freedom is a food which must be carefully administered when people are too hungry for it.

I have my new food line in the works - I think it's over 200 items. Hopefully I can make a difference it's delicious food that's just so easy. I think it'll help people enjoy their lives... it's good!

Spaghetti can be eaten most successfully if you inhale it like a vacuum cleaner.

I don't like food that's too carefully arranged it makes me think that the chef is spending too much time arranging and not enough time cooking. If I wanted a picture I'd buy a painting.

You need to eat normally and healthfully and you need to exercise. I'm so passionate about this because I think people spend their lives not happy in their bodies.

I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

With all of the divisiveness that is going on in the country we live in so much of it is based around just fear of the other. And anyone who does not look like me walk like me talk like me have sex like me they're the other and I'm afraid of them. And hopefully we will learn that it's just not scary. There's nothing to be afraid of.

We must have our say not through violence aggression or fear. We must speak out calmly and forcefully. We shall only be able to enter the new world era if we agree to engage in dialogue with the other side.

Yet it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully - love lust longing joy rage fear triumph yearning and confusion.

In this life struggle here I am among you fully cognizant that a true believer has no fear of what God has ordained for him. Those who are visited by fear live only for their present under the illusion that the world began with them and will end with their departure.

I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement.

Therefore when I considered this carefully the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my view nearly induced me to abandon utterly the work I had begun.

Look not mournfully into the past it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.