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.

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

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

I think that I had a very clear vision when I started writing cookbooks what I wanted it to be, and that you would open the book, that you would look at the photograph and go, that looks delicious. And then you would look at the recipe and say, I can actually make that and I can make it with ingredients I can find in the grocery store.

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

I think there are two ways of eating, or cooking. One is restaurant food and one is home food. I believe that people have started making food that is easy that you want to eat at home. When you go out to a restaurant, you want to be challenged, you want to taste something new, you want to be excited. But when you eat at home, you want something that's delicious and comforting. I've always liked that kind of food - and frankly, that's also what I want to eat when I go out to restaurants, but maybe that's me.

When I wrote 'Barefoot in Paris,' I wanted to make simple recipes that you could make at home that tasted like French classics.