These pharmaceutical company executives are dope dealers and they should be treated worse, and more roughly than dope dealers. When you're talking about millionaire and billionaire executives at pharmaceutical companies, these are people with something to lose if threatened with jail. Frog-march them out of their door in suburbia, handcuffed and surrounded by DEA officers, with their children and neighbours watching.

I'm certainly dismayed by what I'm seeing now. There's a lot of ugliness of a kind I've never seen in my lifetime, or heard in my lifetime. But, look, I'm a romantic. I'm hopeful.

Good food and good eating are about risk.

When my father passed, I was still an unsuccessful cook with a drug problem. I was in my mid-thirties, standing behind an oyster bar, cracking clams for a living when he died. So, he never saw me complete a book or achieve anything of note. I would have liked to have shared this with him.

At the end of a dinner at my house, my kitchen sink is filled with dishes and there's nothing pretty about the garbage.

Italy is good in the sense that when you bring a child to a restaurant in Italy, they're happy to see it. The waiters will say "complimenti" and welcome you and dote after the kid. They don't treat you like you just brought in this horrible probably soon-to-be-squealing creature who's going to be difficult.

I think it's important if you're going to write a cookbook, it should sound like you talking - it should be things you actually believe, otherwise I'm not interested.