All my life, since I was 16, I've been wondering where that next job was gonna come from.

Big feature films are another world.

'Home Alone' was a movie, not an alibi.

I don't like to dwell all day over one scene as you do in a big feature.

I like to work fast.

I think the choice of actors that we have is a little more varied and rich here in New York than in L.A.

It's a lot more fun for actors to cry and rant and rave, or have a drug problem or a drinking problem.

Now I take the summer off, relax, and I know that at the end of July we're gonna start another season.

There's a pace in TV I like.

I used to say when I was working in the theater that if I ever had five seasons of a hit TV show I'd never have to worry about money and wouldn't have to do anything I didn't want to do.

When I was growing up, one or two girls were beautiful, but it was not an aspiration, right?

Beauty has been democratised. No longer the preserve of movie stars and models but available to all. But while the invitation to beauty is welcomed, it has become not so much an option as an imperative.

Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.

I wish we could treat our bodies as the place we live from, rather than regard it as a place to be worked on, as though it were a disagreeable old kitchen in need of renovation and update.

I've always felt very sympathetic from the first days of writing about women that, whatever the woman, whether she is trying to be a woman in the conventional sense or breaking the boundaries, those struggles are quite difficult.

If you continually diet, you are putting your body in a quasi-famine situation. It slows your metabolism down and breaks the thermostat. Diets don't work. They don't help you understand why you're eating more than your body wanted in the first place.

No one likes to feel helpless. We find it psychologically unbearable and inside ourselves we may try to make ourselves part author of our misfortune rather than simply the recipient of it.

Not that it was Twiggy's fault, but the ubiquity of her image created a sense in young women that to be stylish meant to be skinny, flat-chested with an ingenue face and straight hair.

Our idea of a healthy body is so destabilised that insecure people have come to bolster their own bodies by deeming others - those with fat bodies - less worthy, less capable and less employable.

Public intellectuals come from a range of areas and use their expertise to comment more widely than just their field. They want to make a contribution to public space, and they stick their necks out to do it.