Anthony Bourdain Quotes

My mom had Julia Child and 'The Fannie Farmer Cookbook' on top of the refrigerator, and she had a small repertoire of French dishes.

I make friends faster and easier than journalists.

An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins.

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.

Luck is not a business model.

I do my very best to avoid shark fin.

I'm not afraid to look like an idiot on TV.

Big stuff and little: learning how to order breakfast in a country where I don't speak the language and haven't been before - that's really satisfying to me. I like that.

Anyone who doesn't have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me.

My wife was easy because she trains [jiu-jitsu] all the time. She's pretty much on a completely different diet. I always just threw meat at her and she's happy on a 100 percent protein diet, so we seldom ate together.

I look at Guy Fieri and I just think, 'Jesus, I'm glad that's not me.'

Venezuela is another place I'd like very much to go, which is proving very difficult. I have not been there to make a show and I'd like to, very much.

I think there's a tendency to over-jack and over-umami food these days.

Without Montreal, Canada would be hopeless.

It's wrong I think, morally and annoying in general, to try to get a kid to be a foodie, so I never even suggested, "Hey baby it's good, maybe you should try it." That never worked for me.

Recognise excellence. Celebrate weirdness and innovation. Oddballs should be cherished, if they can do something other people can't do.

If somebody crafts an interesting tweet that’ll lead me to their blog, I’m going to their blog.

On the plane, I like to read fiction set in the location I'm going to. Fiction is in many ways more useful than a guidebook, because it gives you those little details, a sense of the way a place smells, an emotional sense of the place. So, I'll bring Graham Greene's The Quiet American if I'm going to Vietnam. It's good to feel romantic about a destination before you arrive.

You know, from age 17 on, my paycheck was coming from cooking and working in kitchens.

I think we should be honest about who is working in our kitchens.

In my house, neither my wife nor my daughter are impressed that I'm on television, and they remind me of that frequently.

I'm excited by any food that's prepared by someone who's proud of what they're doing, who puts a personal imprint on food.

A good, stinky French cheese or a good Stilton. These are things I really, really love. Dessert I can obviously live without.

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

I think of [street food] as the antidote to fast food; it's the clear alternative to the king, the clown and the colonel.

For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous.

I admire people who do things that are interesting to them, who don't have a strategy or a master plan or have a brand - I don't care about any of those things.

Let's at least acknowledge who is working in America right now and what our needs are, as well as the moral question of somebody who's been here 20 years, paying taxes to which they probably do not receive a refund, and not committing any crimes, working hard, and supporting an industry. Shouldn't there be some middle ground here? Shouldn't there be a way for them to be welcome in this country?

What is left of the poor? Try to buy a fresh f**king vegetable in West Baltimore. It is a not completely inconceivable scenario in the future, we'll all look like that... Waddling from convenience store to fast food outlet, chewing mindlessly on 99 cent hamburgers.

your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

I don't think people should be encouraged to look like Kate Moss; I think that's unreasonable. I think the normal human body should be glorified. By the same token, if you need a stick to wash yourself, you're not healthy.

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.

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.

I don't have to agree with you to like you or respect you.

Anyone who's a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: Is it good? Does it give pleasure?

Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.

Being a vegan is a first-world phenomenon, completely self-indulgent.

Learn how to cook a (effing) omelet. I mean, what nicer thing can you do for somebody than make them breakfast? You look good doing it, and it's a nice thing to do for somebody you just had sex with.

What nicer thing can you do for somebody than make them breakfast?

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.

I write quickly with a sense of urgency. I don't edit myself out of existence, meaning I'll try to write 50 or 60 pages before I start rereading, revising and editing. That just helps with my confidence.

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

If you're training in a combat sport, deliciousness takes a backseat.

I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime.

I'm really happy to see Filipino cuisine starting to really take hold outside of the Pinoy community.

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.

Oh yes, there's lots of great food in America. But the fast food is about as destructive and evil as it gets. It celebrates a mentality of sloth, convenience, and a cheerful embrace of food we know is hurting us.

The fact that over 50 per cent of the residents of Toronto are not from Canada, that is always a good thing, creatively, and for food especially. That is easily a city's biggest strength, and it is Toronto's unique strength.