I drank more wine when I wasn't working as much, to be honest.

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

You don't know when inspiration is going to come. But you have to be aware of what's going on around you, so that at any moment, when inspiration happens, you're ready for it and you interpret it.

I have no formal culinary training, right.

I think that you’ve got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way.

I wonder if I love the communal act of eating so much because throughout my childhood, with four older brothers and a mom who worked in the restaurant business, I spent a lot of time fending for myself, eating alone - and recognizing how eating together made all the difference.

I think if you can take one or two things from a cookbook, it's successful.