Fun is the most important. If you do stuff for money, it never works out.

My extravagance is my garden - it's the first thing I look at every morning when I wake up. It gives me so much pleasure.

I use other cookbooks for inspiration. I must say I tend to cook from my own cookbooks for parties.

The thing about all my food is that everything is a remembered flavor. Maybe it's something I had as a child or maybe it's something I had in Milan, but I want it to taste better than you ever thought.

Take one flower that you like and get lots of them. And don't try to 'arrange' them. It's surprisingly hard to do a flower arrangement the way a florist does one. Instead, bunch them all together or put them in a series of small vases all down the table.

When I thought my professional career was over, it hadn't even started yet.

If it's a cocktail party, I generally make five or six different things, and I try to choose recipes that feel like a meal: a chicken thing, a fish or shrimp thing, maybe two vegetable things, and I think it's fun to end the cocktail party with a sweet thing.