In the world at large people are rewarded or punished in ways that are often utterly random. In the garden cause and effect labor and reward are re-coupled. Gardening makes sense in a senseless world. By extension then the more gardens in the world the more justice the more sense is created.

What's a butterfly garden without butterflies?

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

I really don't know what makes a comedian. I think it's a family background and environment. Yet if you put the same ingredients in another person he may never utter a funny line.

I mean I - it's so funny I am you know I am you know a working woman out in the world but I still live with my parents half the time. I've been sort of taking this very long stuttering period of moving out.

The joys of friendship inert the heart and fizzy home bouncing jubilantly with laughter-buttered love.

When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.

The real test of friendship is: can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?

There are few things in politics more annoying than the Right's utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word 'freedom' that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty the noblest cause of them all.

I'm tempted by everything. My husband makes fun of me because every day it's a new food that I love. I have a weakness for butterscotch pudding ice cream in any flavor and dark chocolate although that's one thing I do keep in my house - 70% dark chocolate.

Everyone prefers some foods over others but some adults take this tendency to an extreme. These people tend to prefer the kinds of bland food they may have enjoyed as children - such as plain or buttered pasta macaroni and cheese cheese pizza French fries and grilled cheese sandwiches - and to restrict their eating to just a few dishes.

Believe me I understand the need for easy and speedy. After a 12-hour day of shooting 'Chopped ' say I'm talking stir-fry spaghetti heck peanut-butter sandwiches. But that's not about the joy of food. That's survival.

I will never use a substitute for butter. Margarine is one molecule away from eating plastic. If I'm going to eat that type of food it's going to be the real deal.

Miss Child is never bashful with butter.

I like to use 'I Can't Believe it's Not Butter' on my toast in the morning because sometimes when I eat breakfast I like to be incredulous. How was breakfast? Unbelievable.

A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.

The one thing I've learned is that stuttering in public is never as bad as I fear it will be.