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

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

I think every woman should have a blowtorch.

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

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.

Any disaster is a learning process.

If you don't pick your audience, you're lost because you're not really talking to anybody.