since we must eat to live, we might as well do it with both grace and gusto.

For me, a plain baked potato is the most delicious one....It is soothing and enough.

A pleasant aperitif, as well as a good chaser for a short quick whiskey, as well again for a fine supper drink, is beer.

Or you can broil the meat, fry the onions, stew the garlic in the red wine...and ask me to supper. I'll not care, really, even if your nose is a little shiny, so long as you are self-possessed and sure that wolf or no wolf, your mind is your own and your heart is another's and therefore in the right place.

I cannot count the good people I know who to my mind would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers.

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.

It was there [Dijon], I now understand, that I started to grow up, to study, to make love, to eat and drink, to be me and not what I was expected to be. It was there that I learned it is blessed to receive, as well as that every human being, no matter how base, is worthy of my respect and even my envy because he knows something that I may never be old or wise or kind or tender enough to know.