The part which American friendship played in helping us to win the freedom we enjoy in this part of Ireland has been gratefully recognized and acknowledged by our people.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

If governments let themselves be fully bound by the decisions of their parliaments without protecting their own freedom to act a breakup of Europe would be a more probable outcome than deeper integration.

As our federal government has grown too large and too powerful the real loss has been the freedom of people to govern their own lives and participate fully in the American dream.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

I have an impressionable palate. A well-worded menu or beautifully presented dish excites me. I get a great deal of pleasure just thinking about food.

Hopefully imparting what's important to me respect for the food and that information about the purveyors people will realize that for a restaurant to be good so many pieces have to come together.

It's my first presenting role so I'll be nervous but it's going to be great fun. I can't wait to sample the food and meet the celebrities. Hopefully I can inject some of my own glamour.

If you think of what food is it's the energy we use to do our daily work. I want people to know about the USDA. This is a very important department. It's not fully appreciated as such.