Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.

Always remember: If you're alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who's going to know?

One of the secrets, and pleasures, of cooking is to learn to correct something if it goes awry; and one of the lessons is to grin and bear it if it cannot be fixed.

A house without a cat is like a day without sunshine, a pie without fromage, a dinner without wine.

Any disaster is a learning process.

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.

As we say in the American Institute of Wine and Food, small helpings, no seconds. A little bit of everything. No snacking. And have a good time.