Quotes from Anthony Bourdain

I'm still here, I tell myself. I'm still here.

Most of the professionals I know have for years been retiring their Wusthofs and replacing them with the lightweight, easy-to-sharpen and relatively inexpensive vanadium steel Global knives, a very good Japanese product which has — in addition to its many other fine qualities — the added attraction

It's a gaze of wonder: the same look you see on small children's faces when their fathers take them into deep water at the beach, and it's always a beautiful thing. For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we're confronted with something as simple as a plate of food. When we remember what it was that moved us down this road in the first place.

I knew about that like I knew about the physical forces at play in the kitchen: gravity, decay, coagulation, fermentation, emulsification, oxidization, reduction, caramelization.

I'm very type-A, and many things in my life are about control and domination, but eating should be a submissive experience, where you let down your guard and enjoy the ride.

I've sat in sushi bars, really fine ones, and I know how hard this guy worked, how proud he is. I know you don't need sauce. I know he doesn't even want you to pour sauce. And I've seen customers come in and do that, and I've seen him, as stoic as he tries to remain, I've seen him die a little inside.

I'm definitely looking forward to the day when I stop working - if I ever stop working. I like the idea of keeling over in my tomato vines in Sardinia or northern Italy.

Barbecue may not be the road to world peace, but it's a start.

I'm not afraid to look like a big, hairy, smelly, foreign devil in Tokyo, though I do my best not to, I really do.

Tokyo would probably be the foreign city if I had to eat one city's food for the rest of my life, every day. It would have to be Tokyo, and I think the majority of chefs you ask that question would answer the same way.

There are very sophisticated, very time-consuming dishes to prepare; always from scratch, and always in excess of what you could possibly need. You tend to kill your guests with kindness around here.

Cooking breakfast and brunch professionally really kind of ruined breakfast service for me for a long time.

I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times.

I'm a guy who should not have a lot of free time. But when it comes to vacation, I like to pull the plug completely. It's all about my daughter - I'm no longer the star of my own movie.

The worst, most dangerous person to America is clearly Paula Deen.

My mom had Julia Child and 'The Fannie Farmer Cookbook' on top of the refrigerator, and she had a small repertoire of French dishes.

When I was writing 'Kitchen Confidential, ' I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.

For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous.

I'm not afraid to look like an idiot.

I could do nothing but Brooklyn shows for the rest of my career, and I could die ignorant.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

I wasn't that great a chef, and I don't think I'm that great a writer.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn't actually doing any writing.