I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.

If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.

In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.

My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.

With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie.

Beware of men who cry. It's true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.

The desire to get married, which - I regret to say, I believe is basic and primal in women - is followed almost immediately by an equally basic and primal urge - which is to be single again.

What will happen to sex after liberation? Frankly, I don't know. It is a great mystery to all of us.

What my mother believed about cooking is that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.

Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine.

When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.

I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.

Summer bachelors, like summer breezes, are never as cool as they pretend to be.

I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.

As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date.

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know - it's everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again, you could be.

Denial has been a way of life for me for many years. I actually believe in denial.

Directing movies is the best job there is, that's all. I can hardly say a word after that. It's just a great job.

E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough. How did we ever live without it? I have more to say on this subject, but I have to answer an instant message from someone I almost know.

Every 10 years or so, there was a moment when I'd say, even subconsciously, 'Is that all there is?' You've got to find ways to keep it fresh for yourself.

Everyone loves fried chicken, Don't ever make it. Ever. Buy it from a place that makes good fried chicken.

Food was supposed to be a slightly bigger part of 'Heartburn,' and it actually didn't turn out to be because of me. I just didn't find a way to make it a bigger part of the movie as I should have, and we cut several scenes in which food was a major character.

I buy a lot of cookbooks. Some of them you just kind of read, and you try one recipe, and it doesn't really work. So then you don't go back to it. The new Ina Garten cookbook, which is called 'Back to Basics,' I have not had a failure with. It is the most fantastic cookbook. I think I bought 20 copies of it for friends.

I don't think there was ever a dish that changed my life. I certainly remember a constant series of things that I had for the first time and thought, 'Where has this been all my life?' One was brie. I mean, oh my God! One was my first soft-shell crabs.

I grew up with fantastic Southern food. In Southern California.

I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women's movement didn't realise how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, 'Don't you see how oppressed you are?'

I have been forgetting things for years - at least since I was in my 30s. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time; I have proof. Of course I can't remember exactly where I wrote about it or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to.

I just bring a black turtleneck sweater everywhere - it's the greatest purchase of my life. Period.

I just want to go on making movies, and some of them will be completely meaningless, except, of course, to me.

I think when you get older, things come along that you know are a test in some way of your ability to stay with it. And when e-mail came along, I was just going to fall in love with it. And I did. I can't believe it now - it's like one of those ex-husbands that you think, 'What was I thinking?'

I use those medical gloves that fit very tightly and are disposable for all chopping - peppers, onions, garlic, etc. Very Lady Macbeth, I think.

I was alive during the women's lib movement, and I do not remember anyone taking a position against cooking. I think they were talking about other things.

I was always proud of being tough-minded, and I think I still am, but in my old age I've got a little softer in the head, and that's all right.

I'm a good cook, and I look at something like 'Iron Chef' and think, 'It's a good thing I already know how to cook' - because I would never think I could do it if I watched these shows.

I'm religious about salted butter. I don't understand how it happened that everyone thought we should all have sweet butter. I blame the French.

If only I had grown up worshipping Julia Child. I was already grown up - thank you very much - when Julia Child's book was published. When I moved to New York in 1962, you had to own it.

In California, of course, they never break up couples at dinner for fear of what might happen if someone's husband were seated next to someone else's very young girlfriend. But dinners with couples seated next to one another are always deadly dull, which is why there are almost no good dinner parties in the entire state of California.

Nothing like mashed potatoes when you're feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin, cold slice of butter to every forkful.

One of the best things about directing movies, as opposed to merely writing them, is that there's no confusion about who's to blame: you are.

The neck starts to go at 43, and that's that.

The one thing my mother did make was what was known at the time as lox and onions and eggs. Now, no one makes it with lox; they make it with nova. That was my mother's specialty, which she cooked on New Year's Day for the Rose Bowl games, which we had a party for every year. It took her about an hour to make scrambled eggs.

The realization that I may have only a few good years remaining has hit me with real force, and I have done a lot of thinking as a result. I would like to have come up with something profound, but I haven't.

The truth is that most marriages have food as a major player in them, and certainly mine does.

Washington is a city of important men and the women they married before they grew up.

We're saved somewhat by Google. You can - when you're all sitting around the table desperately snapping your fingers in the hopes of remembering the name of that movie that you can't remember the name of - you can make people think that you are not as old as you actually are because you have the technology to find the answer.