My earliest memory is being in a snow hole, aged two-and-a-half, with my dad somewhere up a mountain in a blizzard. I don't know what my dad saw in me - I was a geeky kid - but he had that philosophy: prepare the kid for the road, not the road for the kid.
I don't have a problem with ageing - in fact, I embrace that aspect of it. And am able to and obviously am going to be able to quite easily... it doesn't faze me at all.
After 40, you want to reverse the ageing process. That's complicated for me because I spent so many years wanting to be older.
I know I'm supposed to say ageing doesn't bother me, then suddenly you're like, 'Yeah, I care about it, I really worry about it. I'm getting old. I'm old!'
Oh, I had, 'No one will ever fancy me!' I had that well into my teens. Even now I do not consider myself to be some kind of great, sexy beauty. I don't mind the way I'm ageing. No reason to panic just yet. I think I look my age, and that's fine.
People's opinions don't interfere with me. Ageing gracefully is supposed to mean trying not to hide time passing and just looking a wreck. That's what they call ageing gracefully. You know?
Ageism works in both directions. As a teenager in the public eye, people would talk condescendingly to me. When you get older there's this feeling that you have to start carving up your face and body. Right now I'm in the middle ground - I think women in their thirties are taken seriously.
I think the BBC likes to have Mary Berry and me around to rebut the charge of ageism.
Ageism is interesting for me because I've been playing someone in my 40s since I was 20 or so, but I have experienced it. I've been lucky in that I haven't had to play the ingenue and feel that slip away.
The beautiful thing is that ageism just doesn't exist on 'EastEnders.' The show saved me.
My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression - thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.
One of my first jobs was as a recipe tester for a PR agency. One week, the editor of 'Housewife' magazine called my boss and asked me to write a column - the cookery editor had gone away on a press trip. I was terrified.
Others have said it before me. If you don't have a seat at the table, you're probably on the menu. And so it is important that we have women in the United States Senate - strong women, women who are there to help advance an agenda that is important to women.
At first, when my agent told me, 'They want you to do an interview, a piece for '60 Minutes,' I was like, 'What is '60 Minutes?''
No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.
Everything bad that has ever happened to me has been caused by agents or lawyers.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
I do read licenses, and they aggravate me, but a computer isn't much good without software. When I need a product, I hold my nose and click 'agree.'
I always knew my mother was different, different from the other mothers in the way she dressed, the way she spoke, but most obviously, the way she mothered. I remember a slumber party where, instead of a sleeping bag, she urged me to bring a small, inflatable mattress because the dust on the floor was liable to aggravate my allergies.
People would say, 'Boy, I really loved you in Ferris Bueller," and it would really aggravate me. I thought I was a one-trick pony, and people had seen the trick. Now that things have worked out and I've gone on to other things, I'm really pleased that people enjoy it.
