Quotes from Ruth Reichl

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 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 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 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 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?'

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

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

Anyone who thinks they're too grown up or too sophisticated to eat caramel corn, is not invited to my house for dinner

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.

I think it's hard, when you're someone who likes to please people, as I am, to be a boss. I had to learn how to rein myself in and not terrify people.

I think of fiction as the highest calling. I'm kind of addicted to it. It's the thing that has gotten me through all the hard points in my life.

If you have caviar, the way to eat it is by the spoonful. Don't combine it with shrimp, pomegranate seeds and huitlacoche.

What I like best is the challenge of learning something I didn't know how to do, going beyond my comfort level.

We in America have gotten addicted to cheap food. The result of that is antibiotic-laden fish, foods that are bred to be portable.

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

You look at the Barefoot Contessa or Lydia Bastianich, and it's just like watching your mother cooking.

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.

It was through cooking food and sharing it with each other that our ancestors learned how to become social animals.

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

I came from a family where, you know, we sat down at the table every night, and you better have a story to tell. My father never wrote his stories down. And you know, I learned that they went farther if you wrote them down.

'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.

You can be a decent critic if you know about food, but to be a really good one, you need to know about life.

Writing about food is my default.

My mother's father was a doctor, and she desperately wanted to be a doctor.