American food is the food of immigrants. You go back a couple of hundred years, and we were all immigrants, unless we're going to talk about Native American cuisine.

People are so used to eating terrible pancakes, no matter how you mess up, they're going to be great. And if you make fresh orange juice, they'll be over the moon.

I think it's part of the DNA of human beings. We are a cooking animal. What differentiates us from all the other animals is that we cook and they don't.

Laos is a country where everything is eaten. When I came back, I would find myself chopping parsley and thinking: 'Why am I throwing these stems away? They're perfectly edible.'

I loved writing fiction. I mean, once I found the character, or the characters, and knew who they were and knew their back-stories, it really - I mean, I went into my studio every day, thinking, 'What's gonna happen to Billy today?'

Reading an audio book is a very odd experience because there are three people sitting out there while you're reading in this glass booth, and you can see their reactions.

If you go back in American history, oysters were the food of poor people. New York was filled with oyster saloons in the 1800s.

I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.

Given a choice between great food and boring company or boring food and great company, I'll take the great company any day.

I like poached eggs, but I'll make scrambled or fried or whatever anybody wants.

When I ate slowly and deliberately, giving myself time to consider whether I actually wanted that next bite, I often discovered that I didn't.

I bake bread nearly every day; I use Jim Lahey's no-knead method and leave it to rise overnight.

I don't think there's one thing more important you can do for your kids than have family dinner.

I think I wrote my first piece about food in 1978.

I don't care what a lot of anonymous strangers think about restaurants.

When you're a restaurant critic, you're not home at night, so breakfast became really important for us.

The American government policy on what we supported and subsidised in agriculture was a social experiment on a whole generation of children.

The way we live is changing. Each year, our free time shrinks a little more as computers clamor for an increasing percentage of our attention.

My idea of good living is not about eating high on the hog. Rather, to me, good living means understanding how food connects us to the earth.

I once ate nothing but grapefruit for an entire month. I didn't lose a pound.

There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France.

I've been to a couple of restaurants in L.A. that were so loud, I left there with a sore throat; you literally could not have a conversation. I think it's very deliberate: There's this idea that somehow it's more fun if there's a roar in the room.

I'm convinced that the main reason we've become so obsessed with restaurants is due to our basic need to get out of virtual space and into a real one. We're not going out to eat merely to share food; we're there to sit at the same table together, slow down, breathe the same air.

'Comfort Me with Apples' is a love story, or better, two love stories. And since it deals with a later period in my life, most of the people who appear in it are living.

M. F. K. Fisher was a wonder and a huge influence, and someone I got to know pretty well at the end of her life.

What I learned is that how we present ourselves to the world is really how we get treated. So if you want to be treated really well in a restaurant, you really have to dress up. You cannot just show up.

I love breakfast, and I don't see any reason it has to be cereal and eggs and toast.

I'm a home cook, and I'm constantly embarrassed by twentysomethings who really do know the mechanics of cooking. How to build a sauce.

I loved being at the 'Times,' and they were incredibly good to me. I think it's a wonderful paper, and I was really well edited.

What I always do in times of trouble or stress is to try and do something I don't know how to do.

If you start with a great peach, there's nothing you're ever going to do that's going to make it any better than when it comes off the tree. In 1970, that was a revolution.

My mother's name was Miriam, but most people called her Mim.

I wanted to figure out a way of living where I didn't have to be in an office every day.

You don't want to give people what they want. Give them something that they didn't know that they wanted.

I have to say I know much more about football than I would like to, because my husband is a rabid football fan, and it's been so horrible.

What often, too often, happens in magazines is that you end up with a great editorial product, and then you're selling things that you don't really approve of.

I don't have my own garden; we're on shale and in the woods. And if I did have a garden, the deer and chipmunks and squirrels and bears would eat everything anyway.

The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience.

My mother started out by being a very good girl. She did everything that was expected of her, and it cost her dearly. Late in her life, she was furious that she had not followed her own heart; she thought that it had ruined her life, and I think she was right.

My idea of management is that what your job is as the boss is to find really good people and empower them and leave them alone.

I was in Berkeley when the food energy in America was in Berkeley. Then it moved to Los Angeles, and I went to Los Angeles. It moved to New York, and I went there.

I couldn't live without butter. Butter is probably my single favourite food.

For me, cooking is a way to try and please people and tell them I love them. When I fall in love with someone, I want to feed them as well.

What does happen in 'Gourmet,' we had eight test kitchens, and at any given time, there were, like, ten or twelve test cooks. And whenever anybody finished something, they would yell, 'Taste!' and everyone would go running towards it, and then taste, and then brutally deconstruct the dish.

I've always hated Zagat. If I'm going to listen to someone else's opinions on restaurants, I don't care if I agree or not. I just want to know who they are.

The hardest part of cooking is shopping, and if you organize yourself and shop once a week, you're halfway there.

Don't make a big to-do about the turkey; brine it, put it in the oven, and don't think about it again.