“I’ve been really fortunate in that I guess I was hired to do A Cook’s Tour, I was already a known quantity, meaning I had written a really obnoxious book and nobody expected me to be anyone that I wasn’t already.”

“There is no Final Resting Place of the Mind.”

“I'd learned something... Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me... and others. This was valuable information.”

“I'm of a generation that romanticizes and maybe even over-romanticized things that were painful, that hurt others. I feel that. But I don't know if I have any regrets.”

“I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I'd give up just about everything else for that.”

“When you have helped to raise the standard of cooking, you have helped to raise the only thing in the world that really matters. We only have one or two wars in a lifetime, but we have three meals a day -- there's nothing in the world that we do as much as we do eating.”

“I confess that my stomach does not take to this style of cooking. I cannot accept calves sweetbreads swimming in a salty sauce, nor can I eat mince consisting of turkey, hare, and rabbit, which they try to persuade me comes from a single animal... As for the cooks, I really cannot be expected to put up with this ham essence, nor the excessive quantity of morels and other mushrooms, pepper, and nutmeg with which they disguise perfectly good food.”

“A good cook is a certain slow poisoner, if you are not temperate.”

“My endeavorsHave ever come too short of my desires.Yet filed with my abilities.”

“To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first.”

“...lest too light winning make the prize light.”

“For as a surfeit of the sweetest things The deepest loathing to the stomach brings, Or as tie heresies that men do leave Are hated most of those they did deceive, So thou, my surfeit and my heresy, Of all be hated, but the most of me!”

“They are sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing.”

“The good rain, like a bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.”

“Now, good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both!”

“We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

“The superiority of chocolate (hot chocolate), both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain.”

“Bounty, being free itself, thinks all others so.”

“A table full of welcome makes scarce one dainty dish.”

“Why, friends, you go to do you know not what: Wherein hath Caesar thus deserved your loves? Alas, you know not: I must tell you then: You have forgot the will I told you of. . . . . Here is the will, and under Caesar's seal. To every Roman citizen he gives, To every several man, seventy-five drachmas. . . . . Moreover, he hath left you all his walks, His private arbours and new-planted orchards, On this side Tiber; he hath left them you, And to your heirs for ever, common pleasures, To walk abroad, and recreate yourselves. Here was a Caesar! when comes such another?”

“A table full of welcome makes scarce one dainty dish.”

“Happy is the house that shelters a friend.”

“The ornaments of our homes are the friends that visit it”