Victoria Coren Mitchell
Many poker players swear by sleeping a certain number of hours before a tournament, going to the gym in the morning, and 'clearing the mind.' Juggling two jobs alongside my chosen game, I never have time and am invariably sending work emails from my iPhone between hands.
The older you get, the more 'mindfulness' becomes about trying to remember why you came upstairs.
I won a prize for 'best sponge cake' at the Clacton Festival 2005. Having said that, I was only up against three other cakes.
When I was 15, I still liked climbing trees and hiding in cupboards.
I'd like to be more decisive. I can take an hour to choose between two brands of washing powder in the supermarket.
I tried doing yoga to see if it would make me a more patient person, but I lost interest after about six minutes.
I'm too short-sighted, too squeamish for contact lenses and too vain for glasses.
I can be a bit weird, cross when I'm cross, tired when I'm tired, and hungry when I'm hungry.
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 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 do feel incredibly lucky to be making a living at things I love doing.
I don't know if I'm a writer who plays poker or a poker player who writes.
The phrase 'working mum' makes me nervous.
Sometimes, the only reason to watch anything acclaimed is on the off-chance you really hate it.
I play quite an old-fashioned game of poker. It's a lot about getting a sense of people at the table rather than the maths of the thing.
I'm just a poker player who does a bit of TV.
I have quite a good card sense. My grandmother taught me to play bridge, so I had a reasonable sense of the cards and how they work.
A long time ago, my grandfather used to play blackjack with me, when I was very small, and I quite enjoyed that.
When I met my husband, he had never spent more than £10 on a haircut.
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.
I've never seen any 'Star Wars' movie.
Reverse-parking in a small space is one of those high-pressure situations where a critical, watching eye becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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 was forced to play lacrosse, a game in which tiny, rock-hard missiles fly at your head, and you must catch them with a stick to avoid a brain haemorrhage. I was regularly punished for not taking part more wholeheartedly.
School is supposed to civilise us, to tame our wilder instincts and teach us how to be more sensible, more knowledgeable, and cleverer.
I don't really think of myself as stupid - but then, who does?
The Highway Code can't be that difficult to understand, and yet my brain seems to treat it as a set of nuclear fission instructions in Old Japanese.
I pay higher premiums because my speeding points spell 'recklessness' to the insurance company, but you can't imagine how risk-averse I am at the wheel. I only go over 30 at all because it's dangerous to drive too much slower than everyone else.
Women are under-represented in TV comedy for a variety of reasons, the hackneyed 'fear that women aren't funny' being one of them.
I am terrible at doing nothing. I'm not brilliant at doing one thing at a time, either. Ideally, I would fill out my tax return while watching a film; peel potatoes while reading the post; send emails in the bath.
You can always recognise my restless peers and me; we are the people whose feet you hear tramping along the pavement at the other end of the phone line because we can only make calls while moving.
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 convinced we go to school at the wrong time. I'd have been delighted, aged 12, to get out into the world and earn some money doing something menial.
I know schools don't have money for everything, but I wish they could all have a couple of violins for kids to try; a couple of cellos, perhaps a bassoon.
Video piracy is among the most irritating aspects of modern life for those who work in the film business. Adverts telling you not to commit video piracy are among the most irritating aspects of modern life for those who don't.
I play poker, a game where there is no edge but the luck of the deal and the skill of the player.
I like snow, but I don't want to live in Siberia.
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.
I dreamed of growing up and becoming a zookeeper.
Moisturise, moisturise, moisturise... is the motto of people who are in the business of selling moisturisers. Your body is already 60% water. If that's not moist enough for you, sit in a puddle.
Nature made your eyebrows like that for a reason. I don't know the reason. Some people say it's to do with keeping rain out of monkeys' eyes. Whatever. The point is, if you try to redesign your eyebrows with tweezers and pens, it will look terrible.
If you find it difficult to draw a neat line with an eyeliner pencil, start with a big, thick, wonky line and then reduce it with eye makeup remover. This is serious advice. I do this every single time I put makeup on.
Never take your makeup off before bed. Sleep in it. That way, you're all ready to go if a hot postman rings the doorbell early.
I don't quite comprehend what Kim Kardashian is, where she came from, or why we talk about her.
I've never danced while driving, nor put on makeup.
I have cared so much and so little about the cars I've owned.
I can't believe that 100% of the people who stand in art galleries looking at art are thinking, 'Well, here I am, looking at art.' They must be having some sort of other, unselfconscious experience.
Being bored by clothes shopping feels smart and intellectual: 'Ooh, get me, insufficiently entertained by racks of skinny jeans; my mind is on higher things.'
It's not that I can't find art beautiful. I just don't know what to do, standing there in the gallery. I don't know what to think about. Once I've seen it, I've seen it; that takes about two seconds. I am interested and then immediately bored, immediately.