Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Cooking is the showy side of domesticity.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.