Quotes from Anthony Bourdain

The tagine's dome top is supposed to force the condensation back into the dish and keep it moist and tender.

Apparently, only Communists get to make money in Cambodia.

Five hundred years of truly appalling colonialism, eighteen years of enthusiastic but inept Communism, and a brutal and senseless sixteen-year civil war ending less than twenty years ago left Mozambique with a devastated social fabric, a shattered economy, and only the memory of an infrastructure.

Everything was different now. Everything. I'd not only survived - I'd enjoyed.

Shockingly, people here, throughout the country, after being relentlessly screwed by history, are just as relentlessly nice.

I'm just saying, I guess, that I got very lucky. And luck is not a business model.

An estimated 30 percent of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate. These and other UXOs [unexploded ordinances] remain in the ground and continue to take lives and limbs.

That was never my problem. When they're yanking a fender out of my chest cavity, I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered. I'm still here. And I'm surprised by that. Every day.

Maybe we missed an important moment in history there. When we finally closed down home ec, maybe we missed an opportunity. Instead of shutting down compulsory cooking classes for young women, maybe we would have been far better off simply demanding that the men learn how to cook, too.

He's an idiot-savant with whom God has serious, frequent and intimate conversations.

Nothing too serious. Just enough facility with a knife to be on a par with any Sicilian grandmother.

People will continue to pay for quality. They will be less and less inclined, however, to pay for bullshit.

And I'm not going to tell you here how to live your life. I'm just saying, I guess, that I got very lucky. And luck is not a business model.

I wanted to be apart from everything I grew up with. In short, I wanted to be elsewhere.

His face was contorted with rage, muscles twitching beneath his skin like a nest of rattlesnakes in a thin cotton sack.

Chefs and restaurateurs will have to go back to their original business model: sell people food they like and make money doing it.

Abdul owned only one cassette tape: Judy Collins's Greatest Hits. I tried sleeping. I tried shutting it out, but, in the end, the soulless trilling and warbling of 'Both Sides Now' slowly ground me down to a state of near-hysterical desperation.

All these women have been up since way before dawn, many of them out on the water for hours, hauling in fish, loading them into their little round basket boats, unloading on shore. Yet no one looks tired. No one looks beaten down or defeated by their work.

That chef was right: messy station equals messy mind.

Plain of Jars is a collection of thousands of massive limestone cups whose origins remain unknown, scattered over a wide area of Laos's Xiangkhoang Province.

1993, my return to the 'bigs'. I'd been

In the Punjab, meat or no meat, you're almost guaranteed a free-for-all of intense colors, flavors, and spices.

I watched the poor sheep's eyes – a look I'd see again and again in the dying – as the animal registered its imminent death, that terrible unforgettable second when, either from exhaustion or disgust, it seemed to decide finally to give up and die. It was a haunting look, a look that says, You were – all of you – a terrible disappointment. The eyes closed slowly, as if the animal were going to sleep, almost willfully. I had my fresh lamb.

If this was what vegetarianism meant in most of the places that practice it in the West, I'd be at least half as much less of a dick about the subject.