Anthony Bourdain Quotes

“I feel that if Jacques Pepin shows you how to make an omelet, the matter is pretty much settled. That's God talking.”

“Just because we are not Italian, does not mean we cannot appreciate Michelangelo, it is the same with cuisine.”

“I'm away 250 days a year. It's a tough situation.”

“I could do nothing but Brooklyn shows for the rest of my career, and I could die ignorant.”

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”

“Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone. Bad food is fake food, food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people's ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives.”

“If you get an opportunity to work with David Simon, anybody with good taste would.”

“It's very rarely a good career move to have a conscience.”

“I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime.”

“You know, from age 17 on, my paycheck was coming from cooking and working in kitchens.”

“I've been very careful about what I say yes to and what I say no to. And I think seriously always about... this may be a good idea right now or it may be a lot of money right now, but will it be good for me five years from now? Will it be fun? Will it make me hate myself? I think about all of those things.”

“Without new ideas success can become stale”

“I'd love to play bass with Parliament Funkadelic, but I can't play bass, so I don't think that's going to happen.”

“Cooking is work that is traditionally done by working-class people. The work itself is not glamorous. It's repetitive, and it's a lot closer to factory work than art, whatever level you're doing it at. Certainly chefs are used to living like rock 'n' rollers to some extent, inasmuch as we get a lot of those fringe benefits without having to learn how to play guitar.”

“I'm sure that at no point in my life could I ever have shown the kind of focus and discipline and commitment necessary to work a station at elBulli or Le Bernardin. No. That ain't me.”

“To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things - and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.”

“If you go to working class, and working poor areas of America, the food sources that are relegated to them are generally limited to unhealthy ones.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”