Success comes and goes. Your flops stay with you for life.

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick!

New Orleans is one of the two most ingrown, self-obsessed little cities in the United States. (The other is San Francisco.)

With any child entering adolescence, one hunts for signs of health, is desperate for the smallest indication that the child's problems will never be important enough for a television movie.

I’m really not interested in women as victims. Look at me, I get the last laugh ‘cause I get to be funny about it.

Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.

Everyone always asks, was he mad at you for writing the book? and I have to say, Yes, yes, he was. He still is. It is one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it! I mean, it's not as if I wasn't a writer. It's not as if I hadn't often written about myself. I'd even written about him. What did he think was going to happen? That I would take a vow of silence for the first time in my life? "