Top 361 Quotes & Sayings by Anthony Bourdain - Page 6

I can't do exercises regularly because my schedule changes from day to day. I'm okay with hurting myself, like I'll lift something until it hurts, but I don't want to pass out or vomit in front of people.

I think it's a universal truth that most chefs I know are happiest eating simple, unadorned good things.

I love bacon, but I don't think we need it on everything.

I think there's a tendency to over-jack and over-umami food these days.

I managed to reach a depth of self-loathing that usually takes a night of drinking to achieve.

I'm away 250 days a year. It's a tough situation.

The mishandling of food and equipment with panache was always admired; to some extent, this remains true to this day. Butchers still slap down prime cuts with just a little more force and noise than necessary. Line cooks can't help putting a little English on outgoing plates, spinning them into the pass-through with reverse motion so they curl back just short of the edge. Oven doors in most kitchens have to be constantly tightened because of repeatedly being kicked closed by clog-shod feet. And all of us dearly love to play with knives.

I'd like to play bass like Bootsy Collins. I'm serious. That would be my dream.

New Orleans is a glorious mutation

I wanted it to look like real cooking in someone's real home or just so out-of-there bizarre that it would be fun.

A burger is something anyone can do, just follow the rules.

I'm a guy who should not have a lot of free time. But when it comes to vacation, I like to pull the plug completely. It's all about my daughter - I'm no longer the star of my own movie.

I'm of a generation that romanticizes and maybe even over-romanticized things that were painful, that hurt others. I feel that. But I don't know if I have any regrets.

In Italy, kids are taken to restaurants very early, they're welcome there, and they learn how to behave. You don't see a lot of screaming crying kids acting out in a restaurant in Italy. They don't put up with that.

It's not normal, what I do. Just being on television isn't.

If people are eating mostly pickles after many generations, where did that come from? It's reflective of history, often a painful history. It's central to a culture, to a history, to a personal story. It's communication at its most fundamental.

I’m always secretly the most pleased when a show just really, really looks good and when my camera guys are really happy with the images they got.

Turning your nose up at a genuine and sincere gesture of hospitality is no way to travel or to make friends around the world.

If I were trapped in one city and had to eat one nation's cuisine for the rest of my life, I would not mind eating Japanese. I adore Japanese food. I love it.

In my house, neither my wife nor my daughter are impressed that I'm on television, and they remind me of that frequently.

The cookbooks I value the most in my collection are the ones where you hear the author's voice and point-of-view in every recipe.

When you're training for jiu-jitsu, particularly if you're training for a competition, you have to be pretty prescribed in the variety of what you eat.

If I'm training I'm cutting weight for a competition. I'm hard. I'm pretty much eating animal protein and that's it. No rice, no beans, certainly no sweets.

In fairness, you know, I'm a big believer in if your kid makes noise in the restaurant you should remove the child immediately.

I believe - to the best of my recollection, anyway - that I soon made the classic error of moving from margaritas to actual shots of straight tequila. It does make it easier to meet new people.

Italy is good in the sense that when you bring a child to a restaurant in Italy, they're happy to see it. The waiters will say "complimenti" and welcome you and dote after the kid. They don't treat you like you just brought in this horrible probably soon-to-be-squealing creature who's going to be difficult.

It's very rarely a good career move to have a conscience.

Just because I like sushi, doesn't mean I can make sushi. I've come to well understand how many years just to get sushi rice correct. It's a discipline that takes years and years and years. So, I leave that to the experts.

If people are working only rice and beans for much of their diet, it says something.

I am a delightfully evangelical guy about things I love. I am that annoying guy who sits everyone down and forces them to read some book I like. I'm looking across the full spectrum of genres.

The world they live in now is in no way the world the Michelin system was set up to evaluate back in France, which was all about motorists and seeing if it was worth driving an extra 50 miles for a restaurant. It's a silly thing. Why do you want to help a tire company? You don't owe them nothing.

The ingredients of a hamburger seldom vary. It's a percentage of fat to lean meat, add salt and prepare and that's it. It shouldn't need a recipe.

Theres no hope, none, of ever talking about it without pissing somebody, if not everybody, off...By the end of this hour I will be seen by many as a terrorist sympathizer, a Zionist tool. A self-hating Jew, an apologist for American imperialism, an orientalist, socialist, fascist, CIA agent, and worse.

I need the anesthetic qualities of the local fire water.

This is the dream of all the world. The dream is to live in Granada. You know, work in the morning, have a one-hour in the afternoon, at night go out and have that life. You know. Go out and see your friends and eat tapa and drink red wine and be in a beautiful place.

I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner.

Look, getting bullied in school and coming home crying in the rain and my mom making me a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup with some oysterettes. It was comfort food; that is what food should be.

A good, stinky French cheese or a good Stilton. These are things I really, really love. Dessert I can obviously live without.

When I cook, I generally stick with what I know, what I'm comfortable with, and what I feel I've paid my dues learning, and am good at.

At the end of a dinner at my house, my kitchen sink is filled with dishes and there's nothing pretty about the garbage.

I could eat bloody Elvis - if you put enough vinegar on him.

It's that show Friends. Ruined coffee forever.

It's wrong I think, morally and annoying in general, to try to get a kid to be a foodie, so I never even suggested, "Hey baby it's good, maybe you should try it." That never worked for me.

I eat strategically. If I know I'm having a big Chinese banquet tomorrow, I'm not eating a big dinner tonight, and I'm not having breakfast.

My daughter takes pride in showing up with stuff that other kids envy or are freaked out by, so I send her to school with grilled octopus.

For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we're confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.

My love of soft, runny cheese - it's impossible to resist.

If you're training in a combat sport, deliciousness takes a backseat.

Italy is hard to beat. It's a family-friendly experience, they like to see kids in restaurants, and at dinner you see all the adults at the table and all the kids at the other end of the table. Maybe they run off and go play.

I'm in no position to try to tell people how to live their family life.

It's been about a week without alcohol of any kind. I'm enjoying my new, clean-living lifestyle.

Drugs didn't work out too well for me.

You dropped a 500-seat deuce on Times Square.

I am very much enjoying the fatherhood phase of my life.

I'd never done anything useful as far as my writing.

[George] Orwell's essays. It's got it all. Great writing, a worldview that I find interesting and useful, and most of it timelessly true.

As Americans, we tend to look at Mexican food as nachos, which is not Mexican food really - they don't eat them.

There's something not normal about you if you're writing a book about yourself, or about anything. And if you're the kind of person who can deal with being recognized by strangers and if that's tolerable or pleasing to you, and not immediately terrifying, that's not normal either.

I think there's a great storytelling tradition in the restaurant business that tends to attract people with an oral tradition of bulls - ting and bollocking. Creative people, people for whom the 9-to-5 world is not attractive or impossible. It seems that way. There are a lot of stories in the business, and a lot of characters - and it seems to attract its share of artists and writers and people who hope to do something creative in their lives.

People everywhere have been very, very good to me, whether I'm with or without cameras.