You know, from age 17 on, my paycheck was coming from cooking and working in kitchens.

Acting is the perfect idiot’s profession.

I’m first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can’t say why I’m one.

I didn’t want to be a fashion designer, and for a good half of my career I didn’t like it. I always wanted to do other things.

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

I have a lot of friends who do what I do. Either they’re actresses or singers or things like that.

The day I think I’m not enjoying the game and contributing the way I would like to, I’ll hang up my boots.

If someone has a really great boyfriend or career, I think, it’s cool that happens.

Throughout my career, I fed off the fuel of people not being able to understand me.

Egos are never nice. I have been a victim of it a lot of times in my career. Whenever I have used it, I have failed.

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?‘

Never get married in college; it’s hard to get a start if a prospective employer finds you’ve already made one mistake.

I always thought money was something just to make me happy. But I’ve learned that I feel better being able to help my folks, ‚cause we never had nothing. So just to see them excited about my career is more of a blessing than me actually having it for myself.

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

My family didn’t have a lot of money, so I worked my heart out to get my degrees. But the minute I graduated, suddenly everyone was asking me, ‚Well, when are you going to get married and start having kids?‘ And the truth is I had no idea how I would balance the expected role of wife and mother with a challenging career.

Dreaming about being an actress, is more exciting then being one.

The idea of going to school and getting a job is the most destructive one in your brain.

You want to play another kind of character in another genre, and it’s been something I’ve been trying to do if I can in the career so far, and it’s something I hope to continue because it’s interesting to me and you get to do different things as an actor.

You never get over losses. I’ve never gotten over one loss I’ve had in my career. They always stick with me.

To be honest with you, when I got into this I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me. I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

Obviously this song is an achievement for me in my career, but what makes me really feel good is to make Latinos feel proud. To provoke that pride that a pop figure and someone so big in music globally like Drake would sing with me completely in Spanish and create this hit ‚MIA.‘ That’s the best part of it.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know.

When I was younger we had a grape arbor, and my mom would go out and pick grapes and make grape jam in the sink – boil it, put it in jars, and give it away as gifts.

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

See, ‚A Time to Kill‘ was the one I got famous off of. Big ka-boom, over one weekend. After that, I did films that I really wanted to do.

Sometimes I wonder why I’m a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I’m a successful writer.

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 career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.

My wife dresses to kill. She cooks the same way.

A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.

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

My father used to have an expression. He’d say, ‚Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about your place in your community.‘

Sometimes I wish I had taken the Bob Dylan route and sang songs where my voice would not go out on me every night, so I could have a career if I wanted.

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 grew up thinking that a research scientist was a natural thing to be.

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.

ESPN is a great organization to work for.

I’m not arrogant enough to look back on my career and criticize my choices. It’s really not my place.

Every three months, I’ll say, ‚Honey, I think I should learn how to cook‘.

Work is making a living out of being bored.

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.

The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too – eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko’s, Fatburger, Subway – I was a sandwich artist – and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance.

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.

I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn’t care what kind of movies I made.

I left school to concentrate on racing. It was a family decision between my mum, dad and myself.

I knew when my career was over. In 1965 my baseball card came out with no picture.

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

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

I’ve never been a hands-on dad. I’m not ashamed to admit it, but you can’t run a restaurant and be home for tea at 4:30 and bath and change nappies.

When the first big paycheque with ‚Dumb And Dumber‘ hit, I went: ‚Gosh, I wonder if this will affect my performance. Will I do a take and think, was that worth $7 million?‘ But that never happened. If anything, it made me rebel against that thing when people who get rich start playing it safe.

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

I was always interested – I mean, it’s kind of part of your job – I was always interested in the camera.

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

I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down – we’re not going to be the number one group in the world forever – so you have to have something else to fall back on.

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

Man lives for science as well as bread.

‚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.

I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

In all my years of baseball, I have always expected to be traded. I never liked the idea.

I loved what I did. I could’ve been secretary of state for ever.