You have no choice as a professional chef: you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes part of yourself. I certainly don't cook the same way I did 40 years ago, but the technique remains. And that's what the student needs to learn: the technique.

You can't escape the taste of the food you had as a child. In times of stress, what do you dream about? Your mother's clam chowder. It's security, comfort. It brings you home.

This June, I'll travel once again to the Food and Wine Magazine Classic in Aspen, Colorado. For many years, my dear friend Julia Child and I have teamed up to teach classes together at the event; for the past seven years, my daughter, Claudine, has been my cooking partner on stage.

My mother likes what I cook, but doesn't think it's French. My wife is Puerto Rican and Cuban, so I eat rice and beans. We have a place in Mexico, but people think I'm the quintessential French chef.

I admire Virginia Woolf so much that I wonder why I don't like her more. She makes the inner things real, she does illumine, and she makes relationships realities as well as people. But I remember the intensity, the thrill, with which I read 'Passage to India.' How I would have hated anyone who took the book away from me.

My book 'Ali Pasha' tells the true story of a young sailor Henry Friston, who, in the hell-fire of battle, forms an unusual friendship.

People seem to be losing their sense of boundaries more and more, what people are willing to put up on the internet, especially blogs. People seem to assume that only their friends are going to read it but anyone in the world could read it at any time.

For a lot of people, it's a massive deal to be on the front row at Fashion Week and look perfect. I don't go to be seen; I go to look at the collections and support my friends, like Henry, Giles and Jonathan Saunders. As much as I love clothes and shopping, it doesn't drive me.