Quotes from Mario Batali

I just signed to do my next book with Ecco Press, a new primer or encyclopedia. This will be my take on what classic Italian cooking is.

My last meal? The food would be much less significant than the company.

You know, when you get your first asparagus, or your first acorn squash, or your first really good tomato of the season, those are the moments that define the cook's year. I get more excited by that than anything else.

When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

To eat the boiled head of a pig sliced like salami is very strange. It may seem cutting edge, but it's actually a lot older than any of the other traditional salami.

We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day.

Twelve-piece cookware sets for ninety-nine bucks are routinely hawked on late-night TV - often by friends of mine. But with a mere five pieces, you can do whatever you like - slay the dragon and then cook its tenderloin in the style of the duke of Wellington, if you want to.

The Gulf Coast has the potential to create a culinary raw ingredient paradise that smart cooks can capitalize on.

You have to be generous if you want to spend your time making someone else dinner. Even if you're charging, you're still giving.

The hardest part of anything is making a dish consistently great - you order it seven years later, if it's still on the menu, and it's still as good as what you remember.

I was at a party, and some squiggly looking dude with a bow tie came up and said, 'How'd you like to be on TV?' Turns out he was the programming guy at the Food Network. They had me come into the office, and I did a 'Ready, Set, Cook' with Emeril Lagasse, I believe.

Although the skills aren't hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant.

Look at cookbooks with your kids and ask them what sounds good.

Spaghetti is love.

The kitchen really is the castle itself. This is where we spend our happiest moments and where we find the joy of being a family.

Keep in mind that in 1975, when you became a cook, it was because you were between two things: you were between getting out of the military and... going to jail. Anybody could be a cook, just like anybody could mow the lawn.

The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler.

There's a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat.

Find something you love, because if you love what you do, you'll never spend a day at work.

Food, like most things, is best when left to its own simple beauty.

Shop often, shop hard, and spend for the best stuff available - logic dictates that you can make delicious food only with delicious ingredients.

My wife Susi and my kids quite simply are the most fun of all my friends.

I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.

When I was a child, our whole family cooked. All my cousins cooked. All my aunts and uncles cooked. It was part of our heritage.