My daughter always behaved in restaurants. And if she didn't, she's going out. I mean, one of the parents is going to take her outside. Immediately.

I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.

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

Silly trends don't last long. A lot of this nonsense that pops up, I don't even really pay attention because it'll be gone in a flash.

The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about - or as a ritual like filling up a car - but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.

When I'm doing a book tour in the States, I'll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don't know where I am right away. I'll go to the window, and it doesn't help there either, especially if you're in an anonymous strip and it's the usual Victoria's Secret, Gap, Chili's, Applebee's.

In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.