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

You can get bogged down in a recipe that's got a lot of steps and a million ingredients, and it takes all day to make. And then you realize, you've just got one dish. For Thanksgiving, you want an abundance of choices, and so you want dishes that you can put together really quickly, but that doesn't mean less flavor.

You can be miserable before you have a cookie and you can be miserable after you eat a cookie but you can't be miserable while you are eating a cookie.

I get up every day, do the best that I can do, and go home and have a good time.

All my life I dreamed of an apartment in Paris where I could cook, and now I have one, on the Left Bank.

I don't like sitting at a table that's too large, where everyone is too far apart. That's a party killer.

I measure everything, because I always think that if I've spent so much time making sure this recipe was exactly the way I want it, why would I want to throw things into a pot?