I don't have a favorite cooking tool. In the kitchen, I always have my pencil and notebook in my hand. I cook more theoretically than I do practically. My job is creative, and in the kitchen, the biggest part of my creativity is theoretical. The pencil has a symbolic meaning for me. The type of person who carries a pencil around is the type of person who's open to change. Someone who walks around with a pen isn't; he's the opposite.

You can see it on the Internet now. New society demands that people share their knowledge. It's asking multimillionaires to share their money and creative people to share their creativity. Whoever doesn't share their wealth, be it knowledge, money, or creativity, will be dead.

A chef is a chef, a cook is a cook; a lorry driver is a lorry driver and a designer is a designer. I've never heard anyone say that Philippe Starck is a chef. The important thing is dialogue. If I said to Norman Foster that he was a chef he'd say "No", but he might have a dialogue with chefs. People have said to me for many years that I'm not a chef and that I'm an artist instead, but I always say, "No, I'm a chef." I just have dialogues with designers.

It’s very hard to be an innovator at the highest level in any discipline. For some chefs it’s merely about combining ingredients, but that’s something you can do with your eyes closed.

The person who's receiving the food cooks as much as the chef. They have a very important role to play... There's no other activity that the person who receives it can destroy the work, can participate in how it's being done. It's emotional. Sometimes journalists are going to have to start talking more about the diners than the chefs.

The menu de degustation is the finest expression of avant-garde cooking.

We knew the time would come that we'd have to step down because we'd been winning Oscars for 15 years. I discovered this one day when I got home, my mother was reading a newspaper and she said, 'Again? What are you doing in the papers?' And I realized if my mother thought that of me, what would my enemies think?