If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that’s exactly what I did.

I cook, I create, I’m incredibly excited by what I do, I’ve still got a lot to achieve.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

The goal for me is always to have the opportunity to work in different genres. This is a great and exciting time in my career, where I can have the opportunity to work in different genres, and also I recognize there’s not a lot of actors who have that opportunity and I’m grateful for it.

I’d like to think I’m a great teacher.

Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.

I’m just wanting to make the proper breakfast and keep the house. That’s my passion. At the request of my kids, I’m taking cooking classes. As I go to sleep at night, I think, ‚Did I do a great job as a mom, or was that an average day?‘

Later on they send me to Hollywood. To make movies. It was all new to me. I was only 21 years old.

The Scoutmaster teaches boys to play the game by doing so himself.

I’m not trying to take New York by storm. I just want to sneak in there, keep my head down, batten down the hatches and cook.

The Kobe craze really annoyed me. Most of the practitioners had no real understanding of the product and were abusing it and exploiting it in terrible and ridiculous ways. Kobe beef should not be used in a hamburger. It’s completely pointless.

My dinners at home are startlingly simple. Every night, I stop at the market near my hotel and pick up a steak, lamb chops or some liver, which I broil in the electric oven in my room. I usually eat four or five raw carrots with my meat, and that is all. I must be part rabbit; I never get bored with raw carrots.

Those places I don’t understand, just doing bad food. It takes some doing. Making good pasta is so much easier than making bad stuff. It actually takes quite an effort to make poor linguine pomodora.

When I cook for my family on Christmas, I make feijoada, a South American dish of roasted and smoked meats like ham, pork, beef, lamb, and bacon – all served with black beans and rice. It’s festive but different.

I think I should learn French and be a better cook – basic, really good life stuff.

I won’t have to do any major changes to continue my career a long way, hopefully. Just hopefully stay healthy and be able to help a team out as I go through and still play at a pretty high level.

I am the most unselfish chef in Britain today.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Talking to a player helps, but in our sport the majority of learning happens from watching another player. You pick up things like being punctual, being nice to everyone, making sure you give your 100 per cent even in training.

I’m a decent cook; I’m a decent chef. None of my friends would ever have hired me at any point in my career. Period.

The Sisters of Notre Dame at St. Aloysius Grade School influenced my life tremendously. This was due to the fact that they encouraged you always to make sure that God is the focus of your life, and they didn’t allow you to do anything except to the very best of your ability.

My mom had Julia Child and ‚The Fannie Farmer Cookbook‘ on top of the refrigerator, and she had a small repertoire of French dishes.

The best way a mentor can prepare another leader is to expose him or her to other great people.

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to minus 271.3*C – not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it.

A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite: I intend, in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both.

When you’re a chef, you graze. You never get a chance to sit down and eat. They don’t actually sit down and eat before you cook. So when I finish work, the first thing I’ll do, and especially when I’m in New York, I’ll go for a run. And I’ll run 10 or 15k on my – and I run to gain my appetite.

I was a journeyman chef of middling abilities. Whatever authority I have as a commenter on this world comes from the sheer weight of 28 years in the business. I kicked around for 28 years and came out the other end alive and able to form a sentence.

Who bothers to cook TV dinners? I suck them frozen.

A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.

You don’t come into cooking to get rich.

Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish – too much handling will spoil it.

You have to look for teachers. If you want to be a mechanic, go hang out with mechanics.

I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

I want people to follow their dreams, yes… but I’m not interested in telling young black kids how to be rappers… I want to show them that there’s so many other paths you can take, besides a rapper or basketball player.

If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.

As a soccer player, I wanted an FA Cup winner’s medal. As an actor you want an Oscar. As a chef it’s three-Michelin’s stars, there’s no greater than that. So pushing yourself to the extreme creates a lot of pressure and a lot of excitement, and more importantly, it shows on the plate.

What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state, than that of the man who instructs the rising generation?

I’ve been my mom’s kitchen helper since I was a little kid.

‚Kitchen Confidential‘ wasn’t a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.

Chefs are fond of hyperbole, so they can certainly talk that way. But on the whole, I think they probably have a more open mind than most people.

Anyone who’s a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: ‚Is it good? Does it give pleasure?‘

The vulgar boil, the learned roast, an egg.

My mother cooked like a scientist. She had a giant Chinese-style cleaver that she chopped with, and a cupboard full of spices.

Cooking today is a young man’s game, I don’t give a bollocks what anyone says.

I had never been in charge of anything. I’d always worked for someone. I worked for a furniture warehouse. I did masonry. I always had a boss yelling at me. So I’d never been in charge of an organization.

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

I don’t think it’s a good advert for any restaurant, a fat chef, and secondly, who wants to eat a dessert when the chef’s a fat pig.

I hate interviews – but you have to do them.

Working with a guy like Ice Cube on ‚Ride Along,‘ you learn so much. He’s a guy who produces, writes, and directs, so you watch and learn and ask questions. As you go, you learn and figure out what you should and shouldn’t do. I do nothing but soak up information.

Would I swap what I have achieved as a cook if I could have been as successful as a footballer? Definitely.

I’m a mentor to anybody who’s interested.

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

I built a label at the same time I built a career.

Barbecue may not be the road to world peace, but it’s a start.

The woman who can create her own job is the woman who will win fame and fortune.

I’m just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.

When you’re older you want to learn from other people.

A career is born in public – talent in privacy.

It’d be stupid for me to sit here and say that there aren’t kids who look up to me, but my responsibility is not to them. I’m not a baby sitter.