The kitchen is the heart of every home, for the most part. It evokes memories of your family history.

My mom had me at 16 and took me every place she went. I remember going on peace marches. She tried to take me to Woodstock - it was pouring rain. It was on my birthday, and I was crying so much in the car they turned the car around and dumped me at my grandmother's house... I had a little attitude.

On the morning of Thanksgiving, I would wake up to the home smelling of all good things, wafting upstairs to my room. I would set the table with the fancy silverware and china and hope that my parents and grandmother wouldn't have the annual Thanksgiving fight about Richard Nixon.

Thanksgiving was always a favorite holiday for me. The preparation was fun! My grandma and I would walk to the butcher on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, order the bird, and buy all the fixings at the market.

I'd love to give my girls a traditional Thanksgiving with turkey and all that jazz, but we've raised them to love Tuscan food so much that they don't care for it. My favorite is a nice polenta with beef stew and broccoli rabe on the side.

I'm naturally a muscular gal with some curves, so eating a Mediterranean diet makes my body happy.

Sitting down at the table is a sacred event. It's the heart of the home. People have ginormous homes or crappy little homes, but the kitchen is where we always end up sitting. It's where the stories happen, the family happens.

Man, I'm 31 years old and a husband with four kids; I hope I'm no thug. I hear all those negative things and don't hear anything positive. I think that's all those people feel... that way that's all they hear about when you hear Allen Iverson did something negative or something.

There's nothing that sells good about Allen Iverson if it's something positive about Allen Iverson.

Me and my family are straight. I am blessed. I am alive, man, and I am healthy, and that is the only thing that matters. Me and my family, everybody else, it really doesn't matter because why do you care about somebody talking negative about you if they don't know you?

My mom always told me that I could be anything I wanted to be. And I truly, actually believed it. And I fought.

I wasn't a fan of the Sixers. My dad was a big Mo Cheeks fan, and he wanted me to be drafted by the Sixers. My thing was, if that could make my dad happy, then that would make me happy, you know what I mean?

Though it may not seem like it, I never try to write about a place, per se; it's always, first and last, about story. Story is everything. Story and a bit of attitude.

We no longer sing and dance. We don't know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a binge of purely passive pleasures.

Computers tend to separate us from each other - Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on.

Festivals are fun for kids, fun for parents and offer a welcome break from the stresses of the nuclear family. The sheer quantities of people make life easier: loads of adults for the adults to talk to and loads of kids for the kids to play with.

Long weekends at festivals, short weeks at home, all summer long: now that is surely preferable to the immense cost and headache of the nuclear family holiday in the sun?

Bosses should sanction the nap rather than expect workers to power on all day without repose. They might even find that workers' happiness - or what management types refer to as 'employee satisfaction results' - might improve.

What is required as we travel towards full unemployment is not new legislation but a gradual change of mental attitude, a shift in values. As our taste for idling grows, we will refuse to work for old-fashioned bosses who demand a five-day, 40-hour, nine-to-five type week, or worse.

Laziness works. And the simple way to incorporate its health benefits into your life is simply to take a nap.

All of our technology is completely unnecessary to a happy life.

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.

Being lazy does not mean that you do not create. In fact, lying around doing nothing is an important, nay crucial, part of the creative process. It is meaningless bustle that actually gets in the way of productivity. All we are really saying is, give peace a chance.

When walking, you see things that you miss in a motor car or on the train. You give your mind space to ponder.

When we are busy at work and busy at home, an hour's walking every day becomes a real luxury. If done alone, the walk injects a period of meditation into the day, and if done in company, it allows space for some really good conversation.

People are patronizing the theatres with renewed enthusiasm - there is an entire picnic-like attitude when families go out to see movies, which is a very good sign. They want to see larger-than-life characters on the big screen and not just watch movies on television or on DVDs.

I feel blessed that I haven't seen or felt real pain to be immune to it. But I am dreading the time it comes. I feel blessed to have everything going fine. My parents' health is good, my brothers are well-settled, I have a great brother-in-law and my own career is doing fine. I hope and pray that I am fit and fine always.

I enjoy the process of composing music. The first time I hear a song, it has to bring a smile to my lips. You have to tap your feet and be able to sing the song.

In the past, I had a knee-jerk approach to work, and it showed on screen. I was doing movies for the wrong reasons - trying to juggle dates, do too many guest appearances, take up projects under pressure or for emotional reasons.

Sometimes I feel I hope I am not taking advantage of my stardom.

I get nostalgic for British negativity. There is an inherent hope and positive drive to New Yorkers. When you go back to Britain, everybody is just running everything down. It's like whatever the opposite of a hug is.

If you work on a comedy show, your basic form of communication is teasing. That's generally how we speak to each other: you communicate the information between the lines of insulting sentences.

You just try to be true to your idea of what is funny and what is also interesting.

People, I guess, generally come to see me do stand-up with a working knowledge of my broad sense of humor on 'The Daily Show'... I don't think anyone would mistake me as an actual anchor.

I used to be good with kids, but as I get older, I'm grumpy and terrible with them. As for doing a gig at a 6-year old's birthday party, you couldn't pay me enough.

The cheese board is my big treat at Christmas that I have to deny myself during the rest of year.

I trained to be a priest - started to. I went to seminary school when I was 11. I wanted to be a priest, but when they told me I could never have sex, not even on my birthday, I changed my mind.

I think if you're at the point where you're popular enough to sell your wedding photos to OK! Magazine then you don't need the money.

I came from a very loving home, had a happy life with no great aspirations, but going to the seminary changed me. There was a chunk of my childhood missing. Once I'd realised it wasn't for me, I still felt a tremendous pressure to continue for fear of letting everybody down.

From a certain age, I sort of accepted myself for what I was. And although to other people it was like nothing ever goes right, I had a really nice attitude that I'd inherited from my parents, and especially from my dad.

You get people who come to London, sever links with where they come from, and then when they need people, there's nobody there. To feel like you can't go back home would be a horribly sad place to be, as is mistaking fame for genuine love and affection.

I came back from university thinking I knew all about politics and racism, not knowing my dad had been one of the youngest-serving Labour councillors in the town and had refused to work in South Africa years ago because of the situation there. And he's never mentioned it - you just find out. That's a real man to me. A sleeping lion.

It is easy for me to love myself, but for ladies to do it is another question altogether.

I saw 'Taxi Driver,' and 'Taxi Driver' kind of saved my life. The scene where Robert De Niro is looking at himself in the mirror saying, 'You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Who the hell else are you talkin' to?' That's the scene that changed my life by changing my attitude about acting.

I don't like gratuitous violence. I don't like the 'Saw' movies. I don't like the 'Hostel' movies. I don't like anything that is violence for violence's sake.

When the business interests... pushed through the first installment of civil service reform in 1883, they expected that they would be able to control both political parties equally.

The traditional Christian attitude toward human personality was that human nature was essentially good and that it was formed and modified by social pressures and training.

I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge.

Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

From the naturalistic point of view, all men are equal. There are only two exceptions to this rule of naturalistic equality: geniuses and idiots.