I did skit comedy online for many years beginning around 2001. Around 2006 I started watching a lot of food television and got re-interested in food. I come from a very food-obsessed family. But I also wanted to do my own thing which was the comedy.

Television in the '80s was very limited. There was no Food Network.

Most of my life I was occupied with American television and American food. My ethnicity was my choice. It still is.

It is great to add some glamour to the food industry like television shows have done for the food world and inspiring people to work in the industry. The flip side of that is unfortunately people think that after they get their qualifications they get their invitation to compete on 'Top Chef.'

My Food Network shows 'Emeril Live' and 'Essence of Emeril ' are not in production right now but I wouldn't say that I'm necessarily leaving Food Network. I have a lot of television still in me. I enjoy teaching people so it's just a matter of time before I do something new.

They both go together you can't be in front of the camera hosting a fitness television show in front of 75 million households and not have trained 6 days per week year round - in a bikini no less.

I wanted to make Jerusalem as feature film. But we couldn't finance it only through theatrical release we couldn't get all the money we needed. We had to get some money from television. So we said ok let's do it both ways. So we did it in four parts.

Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark of night of the other side of things.

I became an actor and because I had success as an actor I became famous. I was acting for quite a while before I got famous television made me famous. I guess that it's television that is responsible for everybody's desire to be famous.

I have also just finished three weeks on a soap opera in England. The soap opera is a rather famous one called Crossroads. It was first on television 25 years ago and it has recently been brought back. I play the part of a businessman called David Wheeler.

You know I'm a television personality. It's not like I'm a famous hooker or something!

I have a great job writing for 'The Office ' but really all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I'll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is like Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean.

In my family in the days prior to television we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.

It's not common for a woman on television especially if she's the mom of the family to be funny. She's usually a straight man or foil.

It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers and I grew up in a very funny conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena Queen of the Jungle.'

There's tons of creative people in television that have one failure after another and they just step up higher. I could never get over that. When I had a failure there was no such thing as just getting over it.