I don't want to look at other people my age in leather. Why would I put it on?

Having come to live in this age is as though one were to have entered another country. Learn its language or risk being left out.

It seems to me there is a change in what audiences want to see. I can only hope that's correct because there's an awful lot of people of my age around now and we outnumber the others.

When it comes to raising civilized kids there are no hard rules but there are two things on which most parents agree: Boys are generally wilder than girls and adolescents are wilder than kids of any other age. If you've got an adolescent boy you're in the sweet spot for trouble.

When I was younger my whole sense of self-worth was based on whether or not I was working which was awful. And I had a baby at 20 years old so it wasn't just about me. At around the age of 30 there was a stretch where I wasn't working - certainly not on anything I liked anyway - and I started to do other things.

Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy. Some people are born old and tired while others are going strong at seventy.

You hit a certain age and - especially because of TV - the young cooks coming up say 'You're a sellout because you're doing something other than what you should be doing.' 'Top Chef' is a double-edged sword for me: There's a whole group of people who will not come to the restaurants because they assume I'm not in them anymore all I do is TV.

This is what I asked for and in this day and age that's what actually goes on. But what hurts me the most is that I work just as hard as any other actress around my age like Scarlett Johansson but I just don't get the opportunities that they get because people are so distracted by the mess that I created in my life.

I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. And when we moved to America it was just the typical thing except I was really good at it so was my brother.

I am a grandmother now and that means age is creeping on creeping on.