"I never do any television without chocolate. That's my motto and I live by it. Quite often I write the scripts and I make sure there are chocolate scenes. Actually I'm a bit of a chocolate tart and will eat anything. It's amazing I'm so slim."

"It was my father who taught me to value myself. He told me that I was uncommonly beautiful and that I was the most precious thing in his life."

"The great hope of society is in individual character."

"My personality, when tasked with creating meals, goes something like this: Is there a way we can make this more difficult? Because let's do that. I don't mean to complicate things. It's just - why buy pre-packaged potato salad when you can spend your morning boiling potatoes and flipping out because there's no dill in the house?"

"In a series, you really need to stay open-minded. It's not like a play or a film, where you can create and fully commit to your character's back-story."

"Family and moral values are so central to everything that I am."