The birth of any show is always a rough one.

It's about the power of design and the power of the human spirit. It's above paying anybody to do something stupid for money like reality television does - like ambushing people.

I think we typically, as Northerners, stereotype what the South is in so many negative ways. We kind of forget all the beautiful things that they contribute to make this country a country.

We worked out a lot of bugs and figured out who was working and who wasn't and how this beast functions. It was a lot bigger than we actually thought, and now we have a well-run ship where it feels I can actually have time to imagine and not just stress out about everything.

You need to have a home to go back to, whether it's a hotel room or a barn. It's only home when he's there.

I think taking design out of the studio and really having a relationship with the people that you're making it for really convinced me of how powerful a thing design is. It's not just an aesthetic decoration.

Like I said, TLC has enough of my life. I have to keep some of it for myself.

Oprah has this intense curiosity that I haven't found with any interviewer.

I think that, in comparison, New Yorkers and Northerners are so guarded.

I had been to the South many times and I thought I knew what the South was, but not until you live with people and live through their lives do you know what it's really about.

I'm so used to talk-show hosts just giving you a sound bite and not really being interested.

There's a big difference between decorators and designers and the training is very different.

I had the idea for the show like a year and a half, two years ago. And it was all about the things that I didn't like about TV. I was trying to create a positive solution for it. And it actually worked.

Being on Oprah? You realize that there are a couple of types of audience members. There are like the cult people in the audience who are just crying before she gets on. And then there are the people who are playing it cool. I definitely was somewhere in the middle.

The birth of any show is always a rough one.

I'm a designer, I love it, and I haven't worked this hard to do bad work.

Design can have such a positive impact on the way people live and on their relationships and moods.

The Deep South has a completely different history, both good and bad, that is fascinating for everybody. It makes people work together who usually don't, and that sounds like a cliche in so many ways, but it actually happened... and it happened because of a beautiful idea.

That was always my frustration with so many of these shows, because design is not an ambush... it's a relationship. You have to know how people move and live and work to be able to design for them.

You forget how many people watch TV until you come into a town like this. Everybody knows you, and I'm always humbled, especially when there are 500 little kids who all have their hair done like yours and want to be designers.

I will not do work that isn't done well or right. Stuff happens - things break, contractors don't come through - but I don't want to be responsible for not doing something correctly.

And the relationships that happen become so intense, deep, involved and complex and really hard to say goodbye to. The hardest part of the show is saying goodbye when it's all done. It really breaks you.

So, to really execute design in its highest form and making people feel joy, that's a great reward.

It's not about doing over the living room of someone who has bad taste in color. This is about restoring historic buildings and instilling pride in a community, which can be done through designing new public spaces and social gathering spots.

But instead of that stuff you get relationships with people and neighbors that you would never get in a city. People in small towns are a lot more open.

So, like I said, I will visit Jeffersonville more often because I now have a little getaway house up there.

I'm opening a store at the end of the month in the New York meatpacking district. I'm launching a line of bedding this summer, and I am writing a book that will be out next January.

To err is human - and to blame it on a computer is even more so.

I've always wanted to be independent and answer for myself. That probably is the part of me I would class to be feminist. I'd like to have children; marriage I have a bit of an issue with.

Sometimes I regret waiting so long to have a child, but I don't make the rules. The universe decided it was going to take me a while to get to be a mom!

I'm an energy vampire. I just suck off everybody's energy. But I give it back.

By the time the children go to bed, I am as drained as any mother who has spent her day working, car pooling, building Lego castles and shopping for the precisely correct soccer cleat.

I support a constitutional conversation, as the Labour Party does, which will allow New Zealanders to evolve a more mature and stable constitutional form, but that's not something that I, as Labour Party, would want to impose, either on the party or on the public.

'The Office' is less a comedy than so many other 'comedies' that have been on the air. It's really about the balance between what is real and what is comic.

When I was a teenager, my idol was the Dutch footballer Johan Cruyff. He's the only person I've ever asked for an autograph.

I am always looking for ideas, whether it is in art on the street or in my world travels. It comes to me randomly and unexpectedly.

Whenever I think of baseball, the first name that comes to mind is Babe Ruth. What the Babe was to baseball, Shula is to football coaching. There are certain figures in sports who are larger than the games they play or coach, and Don Shula is one of those.

Writing and directing your own film, for me, has been the best experience of my life.

Intimate scenes or a kiss is a very technical aspect of filmmaking. It is extremely mechanical.

It's wonderful to work with someone with mentor status.

I believe firmly that it was the Almighty's goodness, to check my consummate vanity.

I'm so picky. People hate going to the movies with me.

Balancing my film career and my music will be something I'm just going to have to deal with, as it happens. I think I can balance it out; the choices will probably be pretty clear. If there's a movie I just have to do, I will work the music around it.

Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society.

When I appear onstage, that's my departure from Momhood - and I transform into Natalie MacMaster: the entertainer, the fiddler, the performer.

Touring for two years is excruciating.

Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.

Advertising was only meant to be a very small part of my life. I had intended that I would work extensively in journalism for about five or six years and then I'd become a writer.

I don't have a burning desire to act, strangely enough. I don't know that if I hadn't been an actor as a young person, I don't know that I ever would have chosen this because it's not really my personality.