The impetus behind going to graduate school was a year after graduating from college spent in Dallas working at the dog food factory and Bank America and not having met success in my chosen field which at that point was being an actress.

I love really good food and I don't ever want to spend too much for it but I like hanging out and having really good tasty interesting food.

Eating and food are a wonderful part of our life's experience and half of us are walking around dreading having to figure out what to put in our mouths.

Grief is a bad moon a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant a saboteur who at the slightest change in the sunlight or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial will flick the memory switch bringing tears to your eyes.

I'm the only girl on The Food Network who grills - I have two bestselling grilling books. I try to really focus on what men and women can do outside together out on the grill. I think it's really fun to have men and women out there together having fun working and enjoying themselves.

It's really easy to figure out why I love what I love the holidays and food. I know the difference between having them and not having them.

I think the biggest thing is clean as you go. Wash all your knives cutting boards dishes when you are done cooking not look at a sink full of dishes after you are done. Cleaning as you go helps keep away cross contamination and you avoid having food borne bacteria.

I don't want to spend my life not having good food going into my pie hole. That hole was made for pies.

I first got involved with ending world hunger and I got hip to the facts about it - what a huge problem it was and how it wasn't a matter of not having food or not knowing how to end it but it was a matter of creating the political will.

There's enormous progressive activism and more often than not success at the grassroots level - everything from living wage campaigns to efforts to finance our elections are having terrific success.

But having said that what's happening with campaign finance reform and our political culture is devastating.

It's not the having it's the getting.

A big part of financial freedom is having your heart and mind free from worry about the what-ifs of life.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions but in having few wants.

My optimism is not based primarily on the successful march of democracy in recent times but rather is based on the experience of having lived in a fear society and studied the mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society.

People are so used to having their lives filmed they're not even conscious of having cameras around. I still have that sort of suspicion when a camera comes out. I view it as a thing to fear.

They did interviews with my wife and daughter-they were genuinely in fear of me having a heart attack working 20 hours a day eating fast food.

I talk to women's groups all over the country and see women struggling with this. The fear of not being accepted of being different of not having a man all make it hard for a woman to do what she really believes is right for her.

Being brave isn't the absence of fear. Being brave is having that fear but finding a way through it.

I'd rather be two strokes ahead going into the last day than two strokes behind. Having said that it's probably easier to win coming from behind. There is no fear in chasing. There is fear in being chased.

Fame does lead to money which I don't have a close relationship with. I'm the kind of guy who never sees the money - it all goes somewhere else. I don't understand it I don't like to deal with it. I have a fear of not having it because I grew up without it.

We should laugh before being happy for fear of dying without having laughed.

We must laugh before we are happy for fear of dying without having laughed at all.

There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized.