What gets me excited is the original principle.

And I like asking questions, to keep learning; people with big egos might not want to look unsure.

A lot of country pubs will receive Michelin stars.

It was not easy with a newborn, asking your wife to give up the family home and your security.

If it doesn't taste good it doesn't go on the menu.

I am not the world's most confident person.

But most is all to do with work. There are aspects of work that are enjoyable, that you could call a hobby.

Being branded number one restaurant in the world is actually very humbling.

You know how sad your life is when you know the release date of DVDs.

No, when I worked as an accountant I was falling asleep waiting for 5 o'clock.

What gets me excited is the original principle.

I've got around 400 cookbooks.

Television forces people to be larger than life. I would be too shy.

It was quite a challenge to make people eat crab ice cream.

I was determined that if I failed it wouldn't be due to lack of effort.

We sunk everything into it. It came close to going under several times.

I would try doing a dish 30 different ways.

We were saving, saving, saving then going to France and blowing the money eating. She was a nurse and had never experienced fine dining but she loved it, too. Our mates thought it absurd.

I have this desire to keep improving, so I find fault.

You need to do the work to bring the money in, but not compromise standards.

Now my complaint is there are only 18 hours to work in a day.

As we get older, we tend to become more risk averse because we tend to find reasons why things won't work. When you are a kid, you think everything is possible, and I think with creativity it is so important to keep that naivety.

I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills... all apart from cooking.

I'm not scared of anything in particular, but I am motivated by a fear of failure as opposed to a need to succeed.

There are so many issues in our oceans - like the near extinction of blue fin tuna - that should be taken more seriously worldwide.

To me, food is as much about the moment, the occasion, the location and the company as it is about the taste.

You think about some of the most memorable meals you've ever had; the food will be good but it will often be about locating a mental memory and taste is inexorably linked to all the other senses and memory, so ultimately it is all about taste.

You can do a short film in three to four days, and then you can show it. Look at the careers you seen go either through Tropfest or outside of Tropfest. You can make a short film in a couple of days, and if it's great, it can go in the Internet or go to a film festival like this one or another.

I sympathize with the victims of Hurricane Sandy and believe that those who purchased flood insurance should have their claims paid.

Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe that that the universe is governed by benign forces, at some point you have to explain why there is so much suffering, misfortune and misery in the world.

Give yourself an even greater challenge than the one you are trying to master and you will develop the powers necessary to overcome the original difficulty.

If there's anything about someone's life that's important enough to make a movie about it, I have to take responsibility to get all of it right. It's a huge responsibility.

I'm going to be doing solo stuff. The idea is to do 'small' and 'off my beaten path,' or go back to an old, beaten path - do some smaller things that I haven't done in 15 or 20 years. Just to sort of get my feet wet, because I haven't done my own material for a couple of years - I've been doing a lot of other things.

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.

I was a very physical child... I was a tree-climber; I was a tomboy.

I continue to believe, contrary to the given wisdom, that it's more interesting to have an album - or, indeed, an individual song - which has variety rather than homogeneity.

I like part-time jobs in restaurants.

I'm always happy to have a job.

By instructing students how to learn unlearn and relearn a powerful new dimension can be added to education.

Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent.

I was a huge rereader, so I've read all the Chronicles of Narnia, at minimum, 13 times each. In reading that series, I realized that someone had written those books, and that was that person's job. And I thought, 'That is the job for me. That is the job I'm going to have when I grow up.'

The Long and the Short and the Tall made a great impression on me because it was a very ugly tale about the reality of soldiering at a time when we were being gung-ho about the whole thing of war.

We as Americans have ripped off the world. We get to throw food away. It's insane.

In the political system, we are a team; politics and bureaucracy, we are a team. The politicians, bureaucrats and the people, we are a team.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Give thanks for a little and you will find a lot.

I was the lead in 'Interview With The Vampire', until Tom Cruise decided he was interested. I was in 'The Wings Of The Dove' with Uma Thurman, until that got cancelled. I was in 'Shakespeare In Love' with Julia Roberts, until that fell apart.

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.

I pretty much always wanted to write a series, because I love reading them.