Wine is one of the agreeable and essential ingredients of life

Until I discovered cooking, I was never really interested in anything.

I was kind of an innocent hayseed from a middle-class, utterly nonintellectual background.

If you're in a good profession, it's hard to get bored, because you're never finished - there will always be work you haven't done.

When I got to France I realized I didn't know very much about food at all. I'd never had a real cake. I'd had those cakes from cake mixes or the ones that have a lot of baking powder in them. A really good French cake doesn't have anything like that in it - it's all egg power.

The American poultry industry had made it possible to grow a fine-looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reasonable price, but no one mentioned that the result usually tasted like the stuffing inside of a teddy bear.

It's so beautifully arranged on the plate - you know someone's fingers have been all over it.