What people do with food is an act that reveals how they construe the world.

In the Italian kitchen, ingredients are not treated as promising but untutored elements that need to be corrected through long and intricate manipulation and refined by the ultimate polish of a sauce.

And while other passions in your life may at some point begin to bank their fires, the shared happiness of good homemade food can last as long as we do.

Cooking is an art, but you eat it too.

[On cooking:] What you keep out is as significant as what you put in.

I don't cook 'concepts.' I use my head, but I cook from the heart, I cook for flavor.

Not everyone in Italy may know how to cook, but nearly everyone knows how to eat. Eating in Italy is one more manifestation of the Italian's age-old gift of making art out of life.