Cooking may be a creative art, but it's also a wonderful full-time hobby.

You have to do it and do it, until you get it right.

Anything that says 'healthy' I say away from... Giving up butter, for instance, means that in about two years you will be covered in dandruff.

People who are not interested in food always seem rather dry and unloving and don't have a real gusto for life.

It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions.

You learn to cook so that you don't have to be a slave to recipes. You get what's in season and you know what to do with it.

In France cooking is a serious art form and a national sport. I think the French enjoy the complication of the art form and the cooking for cooking's sake. You can talk with a concierge or police officer about food in France as a general rule. It is not the general rule here. Classical cuisine, which I hope we are going back to, means certain ways of doing things and certain ways of not doing things. If you know classical French cooking you can do anything. If you don't know the basics, you turn out slop.