I love Velveeta cheese.

I feel that if Jacques Pepin shows you how to make an omelet, the matter is pretty much settled. That’s God talking.

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

I’m evangelical on the subject of some chefs and writers.

My sisters like cooking at my place. It has a bit more room, and the food tastes a little bit better. A big pot of spaghetti and sauce, some warm French bread – works all the time. I think I’ve been eating pasta for 26 years.

But, you know, it’s still a drag to get your picture taken when you’re eating a sandwich. It’s a downer.

I won’t eat anything green.

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 wife dresses to kill. She cooks the same way.

Why can’t I just eat my waffle?

When I’m back in New York – and this is a terrible thing to complain about – I eat a lot more really, really good food than perhaps I’d like to. So many of my friends are really good chefs. It’s kind of like being in the Mafia.

I love the masochistic aspect of eating seething, real Sichuan food in Sichuan Province.

I like chicken a lot because chicken is generous – that is to say, it’s obedient. It will do whatever you tell it to do.

Cooking certain dishes, like roast pork, reminds me of my mother.

Remember, man does not live on bread alone: sometimes he needs a little buttering up.

In New York I pretty much live in diners – I order French Fries, Diet Coke floats and lots of coffee.

The food here is terrible, and the portions are too small.

Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

I hated the Naked Chef. Fine, yes, he did good things for school food or whatever, but, you know, I don’t want my chefs to be cute and adorable.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

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 was mischievous. I wasn’t bad. I stole food so we could eat. My mother didn’t know. I used to tell her some man gave me $10 to sweep out the yard. I was like Robin Hood. I took from the rich and gave to the poor. Me.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

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

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

Sometimes, it’s just easier to say yes to that extra snack or dessert, because frankly, it is exhausting to keep saying no. It’s exhausting to plead with our kids to eat just one more bite of vegetables.

When I’m home, I spend Sunday with my husband. If we’re not cooking, we travel around in our camper, stop at fast-food restaurants, and picnic. We love that stuff that will harden your arteries in a hurry.

I don’t have much patience for people who are self-conscious about the act of eating, and it irritates me when someone denies themselves the pleasure of a bloody hunk of steak or a pungent French cheese because of some outdated nonsense about what’s appropriate or attractive.

I try to very hard to avoid a situation where I would be eating cat or dog; I’ve managed to gracefully avoid that. It’s hypocritical of me and an arbitrary line, but one that I have managed to avoid crossing.

Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you’ve got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it’s a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.

The equal right of all citizens to health, education, work, food, security, culture, science, and wellbeing – that is, the same rights we proclaimed when we began our struggle, in addition to those which emerge from our dreams of justice and equality for all inhabitants of our world – is what I wish for all.

We never repent of having eaten too little.

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.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

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.

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup.

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

If I’m in Rome for only 48 hours, I would consider it a sin against God to not eat cacio e pepe, the most uniquely Roman of pastas, in some crummy little joint where Romans eat. I’d much rather do that than go to the Vatican. That’s Rome to me.

After a hard day of basic training, you could eat a rattlesnake.

Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it’s too assertive to the naked eye.

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.

I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.

Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I’m taking with me when I go.

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

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

When you cook under pressure you trade perfection.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

I’m a fry lover.

‚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.

When I figured out how to work my grill, it was quite a moment. I discovered that summer is a completely different experience when you know how to grill.

Of course, animals have to be killed for food or to prevent their doing injury to others or to property. But such killing is too often carried out without regard to the pain inflicted.

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

Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors – that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.

Nobody in Singapore drinks Singapore Slings. It’s one of the first things you find out there. What you do in Singapore is eat. It’s a really food-crazy culture, where all of this great food is available in a kind of hawker-stand environment.

Tokyo would probably be the foreign city if I had to eat one city’s food for the rest of my life, every day. It would have to be Tokyo, and I think the majority of chefs you ask that question would answer the same way.

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

I think about food literally all day every day. It’s a thing.

So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda.

Get off your horse and drink your milk.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.