'Kitchen Confidential' wasn't a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

You dropped a 500-seat deuce on Times Square.

One of my few virtues - I don't have a lot of them - would be a deep sense of curiosity. I'm interested in how other people live in other places; I'm interested in other cultures.

I'm not searching for hard news; I'm not a journalist, but I'm interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it's a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven't flinched.

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

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

I have the best job in the world.