I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living--all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents.

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

We learn as professionals by repetition, by getting it wrong, getting yelled at and doing it again.

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.

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.

Even on the Serengeti, it ain't a barbecue if there ain't some kind of beer.

The cookbooks I value the most in my collection are the ones where you hear the author's voice and point-of-view in every recipe.