A recipe has no soul. You, as the cook, must bring soul to the recipe.

Anyone can make a good roast chicken.

Vegetables to me are - I don't want to say the most exciting part of cooking, but certainly a very exciting part of cooking, because they continue to change. They come into season and they go through different phases.

This is the great challenge: to maintain passion for the everyday routine and the endlessly repeated act, to derive deep gratification from the mundane.

Repetition is the mother of perfection. If there is true perfection, it's about doing something over and over again. I truly think that if somebody does a recipe they've never done before and gets it right, they're probably more lucky than they are talented.

The law of diminishing returns is something I really believe in.

My favorite wines are Zinfandels.