Quotes from Victoria Coren Mitchell

I won a prize for 'best sponge cake' at the Clacton Festival 2005. Having said that, I was only up against three other cakes.

Casino games such as roulette, blackjack, baccarat, slot machines and so on, are stacked in favour of the house.

It is weird, the relationship between people and food. It's always deeper than you think. It always stands for something else.

When I was at school, I loved maths and read lots of books and was horrified at the idea of having a boyfriend... I was probably a nerd, but then, it was a negative term.

I've never seen any 'Star Wars' movie.

I remember I had a copy of 'David Copperfield' that I lugged around at primary school. I started reading it when I was seven, and I was eight when I finished it. I read an awful lot as a little girl and played games and imagined lots of things.

I had an instinct to take my husband's name when I got married. It felt like a romantic statement of pride, love, and permanence and of doing what's always been done in my family.

If you are actually ordinary, the only way to give royal status meaning is to live an extraordinary life. It can't be jeans and burgers and granny doing the babysitting.

Ed Miliband should be out and proud about his abstruse interests, his Master's in Economics, his political obsession, his prioritising of the mental over the physical.

Makeup is only fun if it's occasional and capricious - just like it's a treat to have an empty day ahead, but it wouldn't be if you were doing 20 years in Parkhurst.

The older you get, the more 'mindfulness' becomes about trying to remember why you came upstairs.

Some of us find 'relaxing' to be, in itself, nerve-racking. If we aren't doing something useful or, at least, that seems useful, we feel guilty, impatient, and mortal.

I'm too short-sighted, too squeamish for contact lenses and too vain for glasses.

It may be vain to care too much how you look, but it is impolite to care too little. You do a generous thing for the world when you present yourself properly.

Society is notoriously stupid in its failure to harness the wisdom of older women in everything from television to politics, family life to boardrooms, and here is one reminiscing with honesty and realism about women's particular challenge: to create our professional and financial structures in the same period as our peak fertility.

Women are under-represented in TV comedy for a variety of reasons, the hackneyed 'fear that women aren't funny' being one of them.

Anger at the wealth gap is no longer about dukes in horse-drawn carriages; it's about vast, tax-dodging corporations. This will not be assuaged by seeing the royal family claiming to live like we do. If anything, that will make us angrier.

I dreamed of growing up and becoming a zookeeper.

I do feel incredibly lucky to be making a living at things I love doing.