Quotes from Anthony Bourdain

I love the saying "Nobody likes a dirty old man or a clean little boy.

She doesn't try to have dignity or refinement. She wants to affect men by what she says, not what she doesn't say.

the pernicious spread of raw food continues, and its prodigiously farting adherents continue to multiply. They must be stopped.

This book is about street-level cooking and its practitioners. Line cooks are the heroes.

You want to see emotional? Watch a table of ten's order come back for a refire in a busy all-male kitchen in the middle of the rush. You've never seen such weeping and rending of garments and tantrum throwing since you smacked your little brother and took away his favorite stuffed toy.

you'd never never never again work for that manipulative, Machiavellian psychopath. And he'd get you back on the team, often with a gesture as simple and inexpensive as a baseball cap or a T-shirt. The timing was what did it, that he knew. He knew just when to apply that well-timed pat on the back, the strangled and difficult-for-him 'Thank you for your good work' appreciation of your labors.

How many'd we do? is the question frequently asked at the end of the shift, when the cooks collapse onto flour sacks and milk crates and piles of dirty linen, smoking their cigarettes, drinking their shift cocktails

I saw how three or four ingredients, as long as they are of the highest and freshest quality, can be combined in a straightforward way to make a truly excellent and occasionally wondrous product.

Las Vegas no less—the Ugly Shorts Heart of Darkness

Shepherd's pie'? 'Chili special'? Sounds like leftovers to me. How about swordfish? I like it fine. But my seafood purveyor, when he goes out to dinner, won't eat it. He's seen too many of those 3-foot-long parasitic worms that riddle the fish's flesh.

Be a fool. For love. For yourself. What you think MIGHT possibly make you happy—even for a little while—whatever the cost or good sense might dictate.

Fully feeling the effects of the sake, I was seriously considering burning my passport, trading my jeans and leather jacket for a dirty seersucker suit and disappearing into the exotic East.

I believe the words "meat" and "treated with ammonia" should never occur in the same paragraph—much less the same sentence. Unless you're talking about surreptitiously disposing of a corpse.

Whatever had the most shock value became my meal of choice.

I had always believed that if somebody who worked with me went home feeling like a jerk for giving their time and their genuine effort, then it was me who had failed them—and in a very personal, fundamental way.

The carioca is a role model and the ideal state of being is his. What is a carioca?. Simply put, he's a lovable scamp, a guy who somehow finds a way, always, to avoid legitimate toil in favor of the popular Rio diversions of going to the beach, flirting, making love, dancing, and hanging out. He is a man who survives on charm and what are called jetinhos, improvisational, amiable hustler/joker strategies to avoid work and keep doing what he's doing, which is basically nothing.

I know how old most seafood is on Monday — about four to five days old!

It feels good knowing you are part of a long and glorious tradition of suffering, insanity, and excess.

This same gag is used by pastry chefs to swirl chocolate or raspberry sauce through creme anglaise and allows them to charge you another three bucks a plate for two seconds of work that you could easily train a chimp to do. But.

I think people lose sight of the fact that chefs should be ultimately in the pleasure business, not in the look-at-me business.

I've assembled a pretty good collection of mid-'70s New York punk classics on tape: Dead Boys, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Heartbreakers, Ramones, Television and so on

It was not a pretty sight, all these pale, gangly, pimpled youths, in a frenzy of hunger and sexual frustration, shredding bread.

It's a little more, but not much. And, you get conversation, which is something to be savored in Ireland. If you've got any kind of a heart, a soul, an appreciation for your fellow man, or any kind of appreciation for the written word, or simply a love of a perfectly poured beverage, then there's no way you could avoid loving this city.

if you're going to a country, particularly in Southeast Asia, [where] you've never been before, it's a very good idea to go to the market first, see what they're selling, get an idea of what they're good at, what the people are buying.