Anthony Bourdain Quotes

I write quickly with a sense of urgency. I don't edit myself out of existence, meaning I'll try to write 50 or 60 pages before I start rereading, revising and editing. That just helps with my confidence.

You have to love a town where you can both smoke and gamble in a pharmacy.

I urge you to travel - as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to.

your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

I'm a decent cook; I'm a decent chef. None of my friends would ever have hired me at any point in my career. Period.

I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

Anything that improves people's expectations of a meal is good for the world. Anything that weans even one kid or one adult away from Chili's or T.G.I. Friday's is definitely a win for the good guys.

I could eat bloody Elvis - if you put enough vinegar on him.

[When I die], I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered.

I love New York. I'm a guy for whom a New York accent is a comforting thing.

Those places I don't understand, just doing bad food. It takes some doing. Making good pasta is so much easier than making bad stuff. It actually takes quite an effort to make poor linguine pomodora.

There's something wonderful about drinking in the afternoon. A not-too-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar - even in this fake-ass Irish pub.

If anything is good for pounding humility into you permanently, it's the restaurant business.

Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.

As you move through this life...you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you.

That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.

My love of soft, runny cheese - it's impossible to resist.

I wasn't that great a chef, and I don't think I'm that great a writer.

Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.

I'm not afraid to look like an idiot on TV.

In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.

Anyone who's a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: Is it good? Does it give pleasure?

I could do one show after another in China for the rest of my life and still die ignorant. There's a lot of places left to go.

Really annoys me any time I see Asian fusion too. Asia is a big place; which Asian are you talking about? You notice it's never Uzbek or Tajik food. It's Thai, and it's generally insulting.

What is left of the poor? Try to buy a fresh f**king vegetable in West Baltimore. It is a not completely inconceivable scenario in the future, we'll all look like that... Waddling from convenience store to fast food outlet, chewing mindlessly on 99 cent hamburgers.

Since the very beginning, Emeril's had a sense of humor about me calling him names and poking fun at him.

Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.

The notion that before you even set out to go to Thailand, you say, 'I'm not interested,' or you're unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don't understand that, and I think it's rude. You're at Grandma's house, you eat what Grandma serves you.

Few things are more beautiful to me than a bunch of thuggish, heavily tattooed line cooks moving around each other like ballerinas on a busy Saturday night. Seeing two guys who'd just as soon cut each other's throats in their off hours moving in unison with grace and ease can be as uplifting as any chemical stimulant or organized religion.

I eat strategically. If I know I'm having a big Chinese banquet tomorrow, I'm not eating a big dinner tonight, and I'm not having breakfast.

I’m always secretly the most pleased when a show just really, really looks good and when my camera guys are really happy with the images they got.

I admire people who do things that are interesting to them, who don't have a strategy or a master plan or have a brand - I don't care about any of those things.

PETA doesn't want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle-deep in their own crap, because they don't want any animals to die ever and basically think chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don't want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them probably less delicious.

I'm not looking to freak people out - eating rodents or bugs. I don't do that anymore.

I'm in no position to try to tell people how to live their family life.

If you're training in a combat sport, deliciousness takes a backseat.

If I'm training I'm cutting weight for a competition. I'm hard. I'm pretty much eating animal protein and that's it. No rice, no beans, certainly no sweets.

I'm certainly dismayed by what I'm seeing now. There's a lot of ugliness of a kind I've never seen in my lifetime, or heard in my lifetime. But, look, I'm a romantic. I'm hopeful.

Let's at least acknowledge who is working in America right now and what our needs are, as well as the moral question of somebody who's been here 20 years, paying taxes to which they probably do not receive a refund, and not committing any crimes, working hard, and supporting an industry. Shouldn't there be some middle ground here? Shouldn't there be a way for them to be welcome in this country?

We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.

I am a delightfully evangelical guy about things I love. I am that annoying guy who sits everyone down and forces them to read some book I like. I'm looking across the full spectrum of genres.

Where once they used to say, 'Cocaine is God's way of saying you have too much money' - now, maybe EDM is. Come ye lords and princelings of douchedom.

Having been a chef for some many years, I understand what it's like to work really, really hard to get good at something, only to have someone piss all over it.

The way you make an omelet reveals your character.

[George] Orwell's essays. It's got it all. Great writing, a worldview that I find interesting and useful, and most of it timelessly true.

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

I think that if all kids aspire to reach a point where they could feed themselves and a few of their friends, this would be good for the world surely.

I think as a moral question, restaurant workers should get paid more.

I have the best job in the world.

Chefs are fond of hyperbole, so they can certainly talk that way. But on the whole, I think they probably have a more open mind than most people.

If people are eating mostly pickles after many generations, where did that come from? It's reflective of history, often a painful history. It's central to a culture, to a history, to a personal story. It's communication at its most fundamental.

Trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times. If you get lost and you just end up eating just anywhere, you know, you see a bunch of Venetians sitting around smoking cigarettes, eating something unrecognizable in a dark alley somewhere, chances are it's interesting.

I am in no way supportive of hunting for trophies or sport - would never do it and don't like it that others do. But if you kill it, then eat it, it's fine.

I think there's a tendency to over-jack and over-umami food these days.

Is it a good hot dog? That’s all I want to know … I don’t think the personal health and purity of my colon is that important compared to pleasure. As a chef, I’m not your dietitian or your ethicist. I’m in the pleasure business …. My responsibility is to give you the most delicious tomato that I can afford, given the circumstances, and maybe increase the likelihood that you get laid after dinner.

I've been cooking for a nine-year-old and her friends for the better part of seven or eight years. It's how I cook today, it's what makes me happy. I tend to overcompensate for my long absences when I'm home by cooking and it's therapeutic to me - it's how I express love for my daughter. It felt good to do.

I'm not going to get off the pony as long as they let me ride it.

I'm not besotted with the notion of being on CNN to the point that I'm going to suddenly morph into Anderson Cooper or Christiane Amanpour. I'm not a foreign correspondent.

I didn't want food that looked unapproachable or ridiculously beautiful.

I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times.