Quotes from Tom Junod

Music subscriptions will eventually replace music collections because the digital universe is oriented against the idea of ownership - because music ownership is itself the eight-track of the Internet.

No one would call me a great cook, but over years of cooking, for me, confidence has replaced ambition.

Most people are hungry, therefore they eat. I am hungry, therefore I cook. Since my senior year in college, when I moved into an apartment with a bunch of friends, I have cooked almost every day of my life.

Bob Dylan is either the most public private man in the world or the most private public one. He has a reputation for being silent and reclusive; he is neither.

Now, I'm fully aware that there is only one figure more pitiable, more ludicrous, more inherently ridiculous than a bad singer who keeps on singing, and that's a bad singer who keeps on singing because he has issues.

Now, I was one of those kids who grew up privy to both his parents' secrets, who acted as the intermediary between them and eased their estrangements: that was my function in the household.

We are trained to distinguish between journalism that's short and long, that's responsible and irresponsible, that stands for the right values and stands for the wrong.

The pit bull is not a breed but a conglomeration of traits, and those traits are reshaping what we think of as the American dog, which is to say the American mutt.

Gluttony is harder than it looks. It's listed as a sin, as something you give in to, when really it's a skill, requiring not just hunger but resilience. That's why the most resilient city in the country, New Orleans, is also the most gluttonous.

Now, I love Israeli food, love 'Jerusalem: A Cookbook', love the homey exoticism, the fusion forged in the crucible of an eternally contested crossroads.

Food's not done until it yields something, maybe its soul or maybe just its secrets, and how long you're willing to wait for that to happen is a secret all your own.

There are only three questions that matter in the kitchen if you're cooking and not baking. The first is how good are your ingredients; the second is how much salt to add; and the third is how long to cook whatever it is you're cooking - the question of doneness.

Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.

I didn't love David Bowie. Sure, I loved a lot of his songs, like everybody else, and, like everybody else, I had an incarnation of Bowie that I loved best - in my case, the solemn 'art-rock' Bowie of the late Seventies.

Every celebrity has become a celebrity because of sex and money. But few celebrities like talking about either sex or money; they would rather talk about ideas, or ideals, or solving the world's problems - all against a backdrop of sex and money.

Of course, Google specializes in coming up with ideas, professes the highest ideals, and is dedicated to solving the world's problems.

I am the guilty gift-giver, which means that I am a gift-giver who lacks all sense of proportion.

Music and television are turning into the equivalent of gymnastics and tennis: sports built entirely around the identification and training of prodigies.

Between 1965 and 1980, my mother, Frances Junod, served cutlets of pale flesh - mostly veal and chicken, though sometimes pork - to my father, my brother and sister, and me at least twice a week.

The fact is, you can't have Southern friends without eventually wanting to sing with them, and without eventually learning that the only way to sing with them is to make your peace with country music.

Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them - more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more.

When a cocker spaniel bites, it does so as a member of its species; it is never anything but a dog. When a pit bull bites, it does so as a member of its breed. A pit bull is never anything but a pit bull.

I met fred rogers in 1998, when 'Esquire' assigned me a story about him for a special issue on American heroes. I last spoke with him on Christmas Day 2002, when I called him to talk about an argument I'd had with my cousin; he died two months later, on February 27, 2003.

But stories don't only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.