You learn that you either are going to have a police state where you don't have any freedom left or you're going to build a world that doesn't create terrorists - and that means a whole different way of 'getting along.'

But short films are not inferior just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait or a poem.

You can be a thousand different women. It's your choice which one you want to be. It's about freedom and sovereignty. You celebrate who you are. You say 'This is my kingdom.'

I like repressed characters. That gives me a lot of freedom to make a lot of different choices through subtleties.

The Declaration of Independence was always our vision of who we wanted to be our ideal of freedom and justice how we were going to be different and what the American experiment was going to be about.

For the past several years I have remained what others would consider underground. I did this in order to build a community of people like-minded in their desire for freedom and the right to pursue their goals and lives without being manipulated and controlled by a media protected military industrial complex with a completely different agenda.

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

Pervading nationalism imposes its dominion on man today in many different forms and with an aggressiveness that spares no one. The challenge that is already with us is the temptation to accept as true freedom what in reality is only a new form of slavery.

When we lose the right to be different we lose the privilege to be free.

Southeast Asia food uses many different types of spices which are quite new to me like the curry leaves which I saw at the Kreta Ayer wet market in Chinatown. With such spices used in cooking this usually imparts a strong aroma to Southeast Asian food which appeals to the senses.

In our house we repeated the pattern of thousands of other homes. There were a few books and a lot of music. Our food and our furniture were no different from our neighbors'.

Bahrainis are better off than many other Arabs. We have a welfare state everybody gets a salary whether they have a job or not. Electricity and food are subsidized school and healthcare are free. And we don't differentiate between Bahrainis and foreigners. We are very proud of that.

A lot of food criticism has a similar flavor to it and I'm probably going to write about it in a different way.

Asian food is very easy to like because it hits your mouth very differently than European food does. In European food there may be two things to hit - maybe sweet and salty maybe salty-savory but Asian kind of works around plus you have that distinct flavor that's usually working in Asian food.

You can buy a box of low-fat macaroni and cheese made with powdered nonsense. I'm not worried if I'm using four different cheeses and it's high in fat. It's real food. That's what's more important.

I'm reading a lot of different books but I always think I have to switch it up a little bit. It's like food - everything in moderation same with my books same with my reading. You read books that are good for you and you learn a lot of stuff then you read 'Fifty Shades of Grey ' which is like candy.

Part of my job as a food writer is to describe food. So my work on 'Top Chef ' I feel is an extension of that. When we give a criticism to the contestant we want to make sure we tell them why it's not working and why it would work if they did it a different way.

Jackie Chan is a very good comedy/martial arts star. He does one kind of martial arts that Jet Li doesn't know how to do and Jet Li does a martial art that Jackie Chan doesn't know how to do. You can both go to two Chinese restaurants but both can have different kinds of food.

Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants but they are dumbed down and I hate it when they dumb them down.

I think what I do differently from a lot of TV chefs is that I break down barriers and make fine food more accessible to the regular person who might be intimidated. I try hard particularly with wine to make it not intimidating. It's sort of a teaching job.

Working at the Food Bank with my kids is an eye-opener. The face of hunger isn't the bum on the street drinking Sterno it's the working poor. They don't look any different they don't behave any differently they're not really any less educated. They are incredibly less privileged and that's it.

The food isn't too bad. It's very different from the food that the astronauts ate in the very early days of the space program.

Food brings people together on many different levels. It's nourishment of the soul and body it's truly love.