I'm not impressed by any cooks who can brag about a filet mignon. A guy who can take the neck of a shank or can use tripe to make into something delicious is really interesting to me; that's impressive.

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

Don't touch my d**k, don't touch my knife.

On one hand we encourage and allow major pharmaceutical companies to openly hook vast sectors of our population on narcotics, and then we cut them off and throw them in jail, and moralize about it. It is clearly a huge, huge, and growing problem. It's devastating. We need to treat it as a health crisis, which it is, and stop moralizing.

If you go to working class, and working poor areas of America, the food sources that are relegated to them are generally limited to unhealthy ones.

When I was writing 'Kitchen Confidential,' I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.