Quotes from Anthony Bourdain

Writing anything is a treason of sorts.

It's very rarely a good career move to have a conscience.

if you look someone in the eye and call them a 'fat, worthless, syphilitic puddle of badger crap' it doesn't mean you don't like them. It can be – and often is – a term of endearment.

Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.

As incisively pointed out in the documentary 'Food Inc.', an overwhelmingly large percentage of 'new,' 'healthy,' and 'organic' alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. They got you comin' and goin' has never been truer.

Without new ideas success can become stale.

Cream rises. Excellence does have its rewards.

I had field experience, a vocabulary and a criminal mind. I was a danger to myself and others.

Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman — not an artist. There's nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen — though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying.

And now to sleep, to dream...perchance to fart.

Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable, and satisfying. And I'll generally take a stand-up mercenary who takes pride in his professionalism over an artist any day.

Early moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad character-or worse, to sex-were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right.

I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I'd yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I'd found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books.

I could eat bloody Elvis - if you put enough vinegar on him.

Only one in four has a chance at making it.... And right there, I knew that if one of us was getting off dope, and staying off dope, it was going to be me . I was going to live. I was the guy.

The last thing a chef wants in a line cook is an innovator, somebody with ideas of his own who is going to mess around with the chef's recipes and presentations. Chefs require blind, near-fanatical loyalty, a strong back and an automaton-like consistency of execution under battlefield conditions.

Perhaps omelet skills should be learned at the same time you learn to fuck.

Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me . . .

The food that comes in Tuesday is fresh, the station prep is new, and the chef is well rested after a Sunday or a Monday off. It's the real start of the new week, when you've got the goodwill of the kitchen on your side. Fridays and Saturdays, the food is fresh, but it's busy, so the chef and cooks can't pay as much attention to your food as they — and you — might like.

And chicken is boring. Chefs see it as a menu item for people who don't know what they want to eat.

I'm asked a lot what the best thing about cooking for a living is. And it's this: to be a part of a subculture. To be part of a historical continuum, a secret society with its own language and customs. To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one's hands--using all one's senses. It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure (thought oral sex has to be a close second).

Remember, brunch is only served once a week — on the weekends. Buzzword here, 'Brunch Menu'. Translation? 'Old, nasty odds and ends, and 12 dollars for two eggs with a free Bloody Mary'.

There is no halfway. You don't, it turns out, sell out a little bit. Maybe you thought you were just going to show a little ankle – okay, maybe a little calf, too – but in the end, you're taking on the whole front line of the Pittsburgh Steelers on a dirty shag carpet.

Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance, as they say in the army - and I always, always want to be ready. Just like Bigfoot.