I'm a home cook, and I'm constantly embarrassed by twentysomethings who really do know the mechanics of cooking. How to build a sauce.

My mother's name was Miriam, but most people called her Mim.

By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.

People are so used to eating terrible pancakes, no matter how you mess up, they're going to be great. And if you make fresh orange juice, they'll be over the moon.

I think it's part of the DNA of human beings. We are a cooking animal. What differentiates us from all the other animals is that we cook and they don't.

M. F. K. Fisher was a wonder and a huge influence, and someone I got to know pretty well at the end of her life.

I wanted to figure out a way of living where I didn't have to be in an office every day.

What I learned is that how we present ourselves to the world is really how we get treated. So if you want to be treated really well in a restaurant, you really have to dress up. You cannot just show up.

I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.

Given a choice between great food and boring company or boring food and great company, I'll take the great company any day.

I like poached eggs, but I'll make scrambled or fried or whatever anybody wants.

When I ate slowly and deliberately, giving myself time to consider whether I actually wanted that next bite, I often discovered that I didn't.

I bake bread nearly every day; I use Jim Lahey's no-knead method and leave it to rise overnight.

You don't want to give people what they want. Give them something that they didn't know that they wanted.

I don't think there's one thing more important you can do for your kids than have family dinner.

Laos is a country where everything is eaten. When I came back, I would find myself chopping parsley and thinking: 'Why am I throwing these stems away? They're perfectly edible.'

I think I wrote my first piece about food in 1978.

I don't care what a lot of anonymous strangers think about restaurants.

The American government policy on what we supported and subsidised in agriculture was a social experiment on a whole generation of children.

The way we live is changing. Each year, our free time shrinks a little more as computers clamor for an increasing percentage of our attention.

My idea of good living is not about eating high on the hog. Rather, to me, good living means understanding how food connects us to the earth.

There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France.

I've been to a couple of restaurants in L.A. that were so loud, I left there with a sore throat; you literally could not have a conversation. I think it's very deliberate: There's this idea that somehow it's more fun if there's a roar in the room.

I'm convinced that the main reason we've become so obsessed with restaurants is due to our basic need to get out of virtual space and into a real one. We're not going out to eat merely to share food; we're there to sit at the same table together, slow down, breathe the same air.

I have to say I know much more about football than I would like to, because my husband is a rabid football fan, and it's been so horrible.

What often, too often, happens in magazines is that you end up with a great editorial product, and then you're selling things that you don't really approve of.

I don't have my own garden; we're on shale and in the woods. And if I did have a garden, the deer and chipmunks and squirrels and bears would eat everything anyway.

The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience.

My mother started out by being a very good girl. She did everything that was expected of her, and it cost her dearly. Late in her life, she was furious that she had not followed her own heart; she thought that it had ruined her life, and I think she was right.

My idea of management is that what your job is as the boss is to find really good people and empower them and leave them alone.

I was in Berkeley when the food energy in America was in Berkeley. Then it moved to Los Angeles, and I went to Los Angeles. It moved to New York, and I went there.