Quotes from Kate Christensen

To taste fully is to live fully.

David Levi is a teacher as well as a chef, and, like most teachers, he loves to talk.

Broccoli, when overboiled, produces a sulfuric stench that causes children to gag the instant they enter the house.

I wanted to write a food book, but I'm not a chef or an expert on culinary matters, to put it mildly.

I think my blog is fairly circumspect and elliptical. I've written personal essays, but they are short and to the point: in and out, and that's that.

After my experiences with the 5:2 diet, I wasn't interested in a short-term fix that would fail later. I wanted a way of eating that made me lose weight without feeling deprived.

It's interesting to try to imagine how early humans discovered what was edible and what wasn't. Who figured out that when you cooked stinging nettles, the sting would go away completely? How many people had to die before the relative toxicity of wild mushrooms became widely known?

Iggy Pop has a voice that's somehow simultaneously self-mocking, wild, precise, amused, righteous, cool, contained and bold. I don't know how he does what he does.

Littlenecks and cherrystones are chewy and sweet on the half shell with mignonette, served raw. But a well-cooked clam is a toothsome, tender thing, full of that magical stuff known as clam liquor.

My first novel, 'In the Drink,' begun when I was 29 and floundering and published when I was 36 and married, was about a 29-year-old woman whose life was even more screwed up than my own had been.

My father's grandparents came from Norway and settled in the Scandinavian bastion of Minnesota. As a little girl in Tempe, Arizona, I daydreamed about picking cloudberries by a fjord in a fresh Nordic wind.

'American Music' is an inventive, passionate, pithy novel whose major theme is love itself and whose minor theme, music, is an emotional, meaningful counterpoint. Like Count Basie and His Orchestra, this book swings.

Loser lit antiheroes aren't well intentioned or earnest; they don't care whether you like them or not. They're self-mocking, ironic and inventive; they narrate their downfalls with manic wordplay, rampant metaphors, wisecracks, and escalating flights of spleen-fueled lyricism.

The male muse is an unaccountably rare thing in art. Where does that leave female artists looking for inspiration?

Country ham is baked whole, usually with a glaze, sometimes studded with cloves, and served as the centerpiece of Christmas and Easter feasts.

In literature, older women are not often given center stage.

In the winter of 2012, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to write what turned into my autobiography, a look at my own life through the lens of food.

I've never been an outward rebel, but inside, I just rebel deeply.

In the aftermath of a marriage, you feel helpless and hapless.

I regretted the solitary nature of the writer's life - other people, normal working people, spent their days with co-workers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, all by myself.

I realized that I've had a really rocky relationship with food - it has not been a gauzy, beautiful summer of ripe melons and perfectly buttered toast.

At first blush, it seems odd that loser lit books are rejected initially, then go on to be fiercely loved by legions of readers. This apparent contradiction might be due to the fact that if they didn't screw up their lives, most losers would be the kind of power-elite, Type A go-getters whom readers love to hate.

A relative of poison ivy and poison sumac, the cashew contains the same rash-inducing chemicals, known as urushiols, as its kin.

I'm not a foodie - I'm an eater: I'm hungry.