People ask me: "Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do?" . . . The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.

I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.

Cheese has always been a food that both sophisticated and simple humans love.

You may feel that you have eaten too much...But this pastry is like feathers - it is like snow. It is in fact good for you, a digestive!

France eats more conciously, more intelligently, than any other nation.

For anyone addicted to reading commonplace books . . . finding a good new one is much like enduring a familiar recurrence of malaria, with fever, fits of shaking, strange dreams . . . .