While working in advertising, I channelled my creative energy into elaborate escape fantasies: cake making, dog breeding, the Peace Corps.
I guess I'd like to have my cake and eat it, too. I want to be known for having a recognizable style. I believe having your own personal identity is what makes you competitive. On the other hand, I would like to be versatile and be challenged to go in new directions.
What can cake teach you about life? That practice makes perfect, and if you try something once, it probably won't be perfect, and you have to keep working on it if you want to be good at it.
The prima ballerinas who taught me were far more scary than Gordon Ramsay. They'd scream at me and pull my legs and arms, so after them Gordon was a piece of cake.
I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn't. I have drawers full of - or I did have - drawers full of rejection slips.
When I was 14, I had a job in a cake shop. I got caught by the boss, lying down eating cake, and was sacked on my first day.
The drawings in 'Portal' were actually me scribbling that stuff... I had a funny moment when I realized that someone gotten 'The cake is a lie' tattooed on themselves. It was really interesting to see my handwriting tattooed on another human being. That... that's odd.
The thing with Joy Division's music is that each member was playing like a separate line. We hardly ever played together; we all played separately. But when you put it together, it was like the ingredients in a cake.
My father - who was a master sergeant and the toughest man I've even known - next to him, Coach Lombardi was a piece of cake.
When I did 'Shaft', I was so happy to be working and to have been a star of a major motion picture, I had no idea or concept of where it was going to go, and it turned out to be this huge film. That was the icing on the cake.
I walk, and I play tennis, but mainly I watch what I eat. I eat all the things that I love, including cake. Cake is very important to me. But it's all about the size of the slice!
I think to eat cake is very good for us, but it's the size of the slice and how often you have it.
There are two really good feelings. The first is when you land sponsorships that allow you to be competitive. Then to win a race is the icing on the cake that you've made with the sponsorship.
Always give them the old fire, even when you feel like a squashed cake of ice.
In 2001, my father finally succumbed to the bone cancer that had tortured him for seven years. His last weeks were a terrible, black icing on the cake, the agony, the slow twisting, thinning and snapping of his skeleton. Everything fell apart.
I have a very big sweet tooth and I love treating myself to something that I wouldn't necessarily eat during the tournament such as a nice-sized cake.
The most famous line in gastronomic history, 'Let them eat cake', turns out to have been an eighteenth-century cliche. According to Antonia Fraser, the French accused every foreign queen of saying it, beginning in 1670 with the wife of Louis XIV, Marie Theresa.
All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm - hazel, black walnut, hickory, butternut.
She tells enough white lies to ice a wedding cake.
I never got a chocolate birthday cake; I got a carob one. And when I went to other kids' houses, I was very covetous of things like Cheez Whiz that I'd find in their refrigerators.