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.

Cats are very independent animals. They're very sexy if you want. Dogs are different. They're familiar. They're obedient. You call a cat you go 'Cat come here.' He doesn't come to you unless you have something in your hand that he thinks might be food. They're very free animals and I like that.

I love food all types of food. I love Korean food Japanese Italian French. In Australia we don't have a distinctive Australian food so we have food from everywhere all around the world. We're very multicultural so we grew up with lots of different types of food.

My gosh I love food. If I wasn't an actor I could be a completely different body shape right now.

I tell my students it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see who's very far away who's a different color who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

Sitting down to a meal with an Indian family is different from sitting down to a meal with a British family.

Large companies cannot finance political parties as their shareholders and employees have different political views.

Europe is difficult to coordinate and our main deficit may not even lie in this area of finance and economics but in foreign and security policy. We have a leadership problem because we are still 27 different members who have still not decided on how to work with each other based on what we used to call a European constitution.

We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world's greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst and then we enter depression? Well some things are not different.

One of the most gratifying things I get as an artist is when people watch me do these different demonstrations and they in some way feel empowered by what I'm doing so they can confront their own fears. Maybe it's the fear of getting in an elevator maybe it's the fear of going on a plane and seeing the world.

I'm always interested in trying to investigate different personalities. I want to keep myself guessing and keep the fear element alive so that I don't get too comfortable.

I know a lot of people fear the rougher types who might be at a state school but surely it is better to know who they are and how to deal with them than for that kind of child to appear as a completely different species to yours.

Another parent's different approach raises the possibility that you've made a mistake with your child. We simply can't tolerate that because we fear that any mistake no matter how minor could have devastating consequences. So we proclaim the superiority of our own choices. We've lost sight of the fact that people have preferences.