Quotes from Tom Junod

Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn't like himself very much. It was not his fault. He was born with cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy is something that happens to the brain. It means that you can think but sometimes can't walk, or even talk.

And you understand something: that although, like all American eaters, you've been conditioned to think of the entree as the climax of the meal, it never is. It is, indeed, almost always disappointing, especially if you order fish.

I was a bully in fifth and sixth grade. I wasn't one of the bullies - I wasn't strong or dominant enough to be one of the kids who bullied everyone in equal measure. I was a bully, in that I bullied a kid, whose name I won't mention here. My bullying was selective and personal.

My parents were ambitious people, my father especially, whose entire life was devoted to rising above, but his ambitions were defeated long before death finished them off, and so when he died, he came back to where he started, but he didn't come back home, because there was no home to come back to.

I'm a suit guy. I like wearing them for the sense of completion they offer. I like buying them for the sense of near permanence - the knowledge that whatever I buy will be part of my life for the next ten years or so.

The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.

Without your data, Google couldn't pursue the dream of trying to figure out what you're really thinking when you're asking a question, of trying to discern, from the imprecision of your language, the exact answer you're looking for.

There are no foodies at funerals.

I was not a fan. Moreover, I reveled in not being a fan, as though not being able to tolerate Robin Williams was one of the things by which I defined myself.

By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don't grow up at all. And neither do we.

There's an easy way to tell who won a fight, whether it occurs in a ring or in a schoolyard. Watch it with a second-grade boy and ask him the winner. He'll always know. If he doesn't know, the fight wasn't worth watching.

I am not running for president, but I've always known if I ever did run for president - or local dogcatcher, for that matter - the boy I bullied would and should arise as a necessary ghost from my past.

That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.

Any child can tell you what Google does - Google gives you the answers. But Google doesn't, not really.

I have never baked. I have cooked thousands of meals big and small, but I have never cooked a cookie. I have never roasted a cake, or a pie.

The great character actors are now the actors whose work has the element of ritual sacrifice once claimed by the DeNiros of the world, as well as the element of danger - the actors who thrill us by going for broke.

Fred Rogers was a children's-TV host, but he was not Captain Kangaroo or Officer Joe Bolton. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister who was so appalled by what he saw on 1950s television--adults trying to entertain children by throwing pies in each other's faces - that he joined the medium as a reformer.

In a society in which the median age keeps advancing, we have no choice but to keep redefining youth.

I never met Lou Reed, never was one of those journalists lucky enough to be the object of his derision, contempt, condescension, indifference, and occasional piercing honesty.

I don't play guitar. I sing. I'm the lead singer, of Cousin Billy. I also play harmonica, after a fashion.

My ten-year-old daughter loves gifts. She loves to give them and she loves to get them. She loves to give them when she's hurt her parents' feelings, and she loves to get them when her parents have hurt hers.

You don't have to love cooking to cook, but you have to do more than love baking to bake. You have to bake out of love.

One of the great pleasures of reading Tom Wolfe - of still reading Tom Wolfe - is the sense of awe he consistently inspires.

Cooking is, to me, the perfect fusion of generosity and selfishness, indeed the resolution of generosity and selfishness, the answer to my torn nature.