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

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.

To share the dressing room of club and country with Bhai was an amazing experience. I learnt a lot from him and other senior players like Renedy Singh.

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.

An employer of mine back in the ’80s was kind enough to take me on after a rough patch, and it made a big difference in my life that I knew I was the sort of person who showed up on time. It’s a basic tell of character.

Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. Do not overdo it.

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.

I worked with Lawrence Olivier some years ago. He was a great mentor.

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

I got a chance to work with Stallone and De Niro – pretty much sums it up for me. You can tell where you’re going in your career by the company you keep.

You can call me the bad boy chef all you want. I’m not going to freak out about it. I’m not that bad. I’m certainly not a boy, and it’s been a while since I’ve been a chef.

I am a chef who happens to appear on the telly, that’s it.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

I still love football, though, and I think cooking is like football. It’s not a job, it’s a passion. When you become good at it, it’s a dream job and financially you need never to worry. Ever.

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

If you don’t let people flourish in their jobs, why are they going to stay?

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

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

While still working for others, your goal at some point must be to carve out little areas that you can operate on your own, cultivating entrepreneurial skills.

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

There’s a bond among a kitchen staff, I think. You spend more time with your chef in the kitchen than you do with your own family.

I don’t need a successor, only willing hands to accept the torch for a new generation.

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.

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

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup.

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.

Before finding music, I didn’t have too many aspirations. I wanted to hang out, make a little money from whatever I had to do.

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.

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

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

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

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

I think every chef, not just in America, but across the world, has a double-edged sword – two jackets, one that’s driven, a self-confessed perfectionist, thoroughbred, hate incompetence and switch off the stove, take off the jacket and become a family man.

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

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

Kitchens are hard environments and they form incredibly strong characters.

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

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

‚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.

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.

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

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

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

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

There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.

I hate interviews – but you have to do them.

I’ve taken so many kids out of Pittsburgh and onto the great white way in New York City right into a Broadway show.

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

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

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

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.

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 want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead.

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

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

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.

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

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?‘

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.

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.