Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they've lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat - and drink! - with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.

Sharing our meals should be a joyful and a trustful act, rather than the cursory fulfillment of our social obligations.

Wine and cheese are ageless companions, like aspirin and aches, or June and moon, or good people and noble ventures.

But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence.

On the other hand, a flaccid, moping, debauched mollusc, tired from too much love and loose-nerved from general world conditions, can be a shameful thing served raw upon the shell.

A potato is a poor thing, poorly treated. More often than not it is cooked in so unthinking and ignorant a manner as to make one feel that it has never before been encountered in the kitchen.

. . . word-sniffing . . . is an addiction, like glue -- or snow -- sniffing in a somewhat less destructive way, physically if not economically. . . . As an addict, I am almost guiltily interested in converts to my own illness . . .