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

I like old people when they have aged well.

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.

[Bachelors'] approach to gastronomy is basically sexual, since few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman.

I wrote like a junkie. I had to have my daily fix.

The things men come to eat when they are alone are, I suppose, not much stranger than the men themselves.... A writer years ago told me of living for five months on hen mash.

Brioches are a light, pale yellow, faintly sweet kind of muffin with a characteristic blob on top, rather like a mushroom just pushing crookedly through the ground. Once eaten in Paris, they never taste as good anywhere else.