Top 361 Quotes & Sayings by Anthony Bourdain - Page 5

I'm not afraid to look like an idiot on TV.

In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.

Cooking breakfast and brunch professionally really kind of ruined breakfast service for me for a long time.

The Italians seem to have a better attitude with kids and the food is great!

I'm not going to get off the pony as long as they let me ride it.

I'm at my most productive before I even have my first cup of coffee. I only get slower and stupider as the day progresses.

What is left of the poor? Try to buy a fresh f**king vegetable in West Baltimore. It is a not completely inconceivable scenario in the future, we'll all look like that... Waddling from convenience store to fast food outlet, chewing mindlessly on 99 cent hamburgers.

We now have a generation of people who in many cases feel that if they become chefs, they'll get a TV show. They have a signature haircut, a year into the business, or a branding arrangement with a shoe company. I don't really relate to that. I guess this is the world we live in now.

I travel 250 days a year. There are chef friends who I only see every couple of years. By conventional standards I'm a bad friend. I'm not there to remember your birthday or to offer you words of support through Twitter. I'm not up on what you're doing in New York because I'm not in New York. I'm not what people call in parenting circles "present."

Without new ideas success can become stale

I've been cooking for a nine-year-old and her friends for the better part of seven or eight years. It's how I cook today, it's what makes me happy. I tend to overcompensate for my long absences when I'm home by cooking and it's therapeutic to me - it's how I express love for my daughter. It felt good to do.

I wouldn't want to compare myself to David Byrne whom I consider a genius, but what I think what we have in common is that he's also a guy who is very interested in the world and who has a lot of passions beyond singing and playing guitar.

The biggest empty space, the biggest gap in what should be a premier and always vibrant food scene in America is that we don't have hawker centers like they do in Singapore, basically food courts where mom and pop specialists can set up shop in fairly hygienic little stalls all up to health code making one dish they've been doing forever and ever.

Cream rises. Excellence does have its rewards.

I didn't want food that looked unapproachable or ridiculously beautiful.

My tastes in what I eat at home would be very familiar to most people who cook for families. I just organize those things a little bit differently.

Silly trends don't last long. A lot of this nonsense that pops up, I don't even really pay attention because it'll be gone in a flash.

Cooking is work that is traditionally done by working-class people. The work itself is not glamorous. It's repetitive, and it's a lot closer to factory work than art, whatever level you're doing it at. Certainly chefs are used to living like rock 'n' rollers to some extent, inasmuch as we get a lot of those fringe benefits without having to learn how to play guitar.

I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living--all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents.

If somebody crafts an interesting tweet that’ll lead me to their blog, I’m going to their blog.

My family is very far from normal.

I'd like to make a show with Keith Richards.

I do the meatball recipe a lot. I think the army stew probably too. It's the most useful dish because it was born out of necessity and poverty and any idiot can make it in 20 minutes on a hot plate. It's cheap and uses readily available commercial ingredients. And it's delicious. It should be the great American dish - perfect late-night stoner dorm food for college kids on a budget.

Where once they used to say, 'Cocaine is God's way of saying you have too much money' - now, maybe EDM is. Come ye lords and princelings of douchedom.

On one hand we encourage and allow major pharmaceutical companies to openly hook vast sectors of our population on narcotics, and then we cut them off and throw them in jail, and moralize about it. It is clearly a huge, huge, and growing problem. It's devastating. We need to treat it as a health crisis, which it is, and stop moralizing.

Very few restaurant workers could even dream of eating in the restaurants they work in. Many do not make a living wage.

I’m a Twitter addict. Jose Andres is a serial tweeter. It’s funny to see which chefs have embraced it, and the different paths they take.

I won't eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn't a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can't be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.

It's as if Japanese men, all to aware that deep inside they'd like to stomp Tokyo flat, breathe fire, and do truly terrible and disgusting things to women, have built themselves the most beautiful of prisons for their rampaging ids. Instead of indulging their fantasies, they focus on food, or landscaping, or the perfect cup of tea -- or a single slab of o-toro tuna -- letting themselves go only at baseball games and office parties.

I am in no way supportive of hunting for trophies or sport - would never do it and don't like it that others do. But if you kill it, then eat it, it's fine.

Most of the time, I'm fighting guys who are 22 years old, former college wrestlers, athletes, kids who are in much better shape than me. Often people who are much bigger and wider than me. It can be dispiriting at first.

I think we should increase the minimum wage and I think $15 is a good beginning.

I was a serious comic collector and fanboy as a kid. I wanted very badly to draw comic books for a lot of my childhood and early adolescence. So when you have an unfulfilled dream like that, when years later you find yourself in a position to make a graphic novel - hell yeah, I'm going to do that.

I'm really happy to see Filipino cuisine starting to really take hold outside of the Pinoy community.

I admire vegetarians who refuse to eat nothing but vegetables in their homes, but I also admire those who put aside those principles or those preferences when they travel. Just to be a good guest.

You know, it's not the world I would have wanted, for sure.

I think as a moral question, restaurant workers should get paid more.

Cooking professionally is a dominant act, at all times about control. Eating well, on the other hand, is about submission. It's about giving up all vestiges of control, about entrusting your fate entirely to someone else. It's about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating, and shrewd person inside you, and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a warm bath. It's about shutting down the radar and letting good things happen. Let it happen to you.

Even on the Serengeti, it ain't a barbecue if there ain't some kind of beer.

Just because we are not Italian, does not mean we cannot appreciate Michelangelo, it is the same with cuisine.

Venezuela is another place I'd like very much to go, which is proving very difficult. I have not been there to make a show and I'd like to, very much.

I'm really happy to see the explosion of interest in Korean food, and this hybrid Korean-American food.

When do you stop to de-douche?

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

I think it's important if you're going to write a cookbook, it should sound like you talking - it should be things you actually believe, otherwise I'm not interested.

Only desperation can account for what the Chinese do in the name of 'medicine.' That's something you might remind your New Age friends who've gone gaga over 'holistic medicine' and 'alternative Chinese cures.

Trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times. If you get lost and you just end up eating just anywhere, you know, you see a bunch of Venetians sitting around smoking cigarettes, eating something unrecognizable in a dark alley somewhere, chances are it's interesting.

I'm not impressed by any cooks who can brag about a filet mignon. A guy who can take the neck of a shank or can use tripe to make into something delicious is really interesting to me; that's impressive.

Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a "decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention.

My French definitely improves the more I drink, as I worry less and less about absolutely perfect grammar. I do speak and understand the language, just not particularly well.

I'm sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you're confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.

Really annoys me any time I see Asian fusion too. Asia is a big place; which Asian are you talking about? You notice it's never Uzbek or Tajik food. It's Thai, and it's generally insulting.

Being on television, being recognizable, this is unnatural.

My daughter always behaved in restaurants. And if she didn't, she's going out. I mean, one of the parents is going to take her outside. Immediately.

I did go into the Amazonian region of Brazil. They have prehistoric river fish that weigh in at around 600 pounds, which you don’t see anywhere else. And foods that cannot be exported or even found in other parts of Brazil.

I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas - fat, drugged, and completely out of it.

When my father passed, I was still an unsuccessful cook with a drug problem. I was in my mid-thirties, standing behind an oyster bar, cracking clams for a living when he died. So, he never saw me complete a book or achieve anything of note. I would have liked to have shared this with him.

If you go to working class, and working poor areas of America, the food sources that are relegated to them are generally limited to unhealthy ones.

There are very sophisticated, very time-consuming dishes to prepare; always from scratch, and always in excess of what you could possibly need. You tend to kill your guests with kindness around here.

America's most dangerous export was, is and always will be our fast-food outlets.