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" I've always hated Zagat. If I'm going to listen to someone else's opinions on restaurants, I don't care if I agree or not. I just want to know who they are. "

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" 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. "

" What I always do in times of trouble or stress is to try and do something I don't know how to do. "

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

" I'm not a big turkey fan, but my husband loves it. Thanksgiving is his favorite meal. "

" When you're a restaurant critic, you're not home at night, so breakfast became really important for us. "

" The truth is, as much as I loved writing restaurant reviews, it always felt very self-indulgent to me. It was so much fun, I loved doing it, but there's so much else to say about food. "

" Ask people to pitch in - hand them a spoon and ask them to stir. Doing things together, having everyone help, makes for a nicer party. "

" It was through cooking food and sharing it with each other that our ancestors learned how to become social animals. "

" 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. "

" The way we allow children to be advertised to is shocking. Eating is a learned behavior, and we've made these kids sitting ducks for all the bad messages about industrialized food. The fact that we allow that to go on is horrifying. "

" To me, cooking is man's natural activity. But I think writing is really hard. Certainly writing fiction is the hardest thing I've ever done. "

" I loved writing fiction. I mean, once I found the character, or the characters, and knew who they were and knew their back-stories, it really - I mean, I went into my studio every day, thinking, 'What's gonna happen to Billy today?' "

" My mother's father was a doctor, and she desperately wanted to be a doctor. "

" World War II really fascinated me because it's the only time that everybody in this country sat down at the same table, because eating on rations was your patriotic duty. "

" The secret to life is finding joy in ordinary things. I'm interested in happiness. "

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

" 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 love breakfast, and I don't see any reason it has to be cereal and eggs and toast. "

" What does happen in 'Gourmet,' we had eight test kitchens, and at any given time, there were, like, ten or twelve test cooks. And whenever anybody finished something, they would yell, 'Taste!' and everyone would go running towards it, and then taste, and then brutally deconstruct the dish. "

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

" I love to make pies - pot pies, quiches, savory tarts, fruit pies. I use an old-fashioned pastry blender with wires and a wooden handle. I never use a recipe. "

" 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. "

" Don't make a big to-do about the turkey; brine it, put it in the oven, and don't think about it again. "

" 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. "

" When I came to 'Gourmet,' I had no clue how to run a magazine; for television, I am fascinated to learn about editing. "

" If you're going to tell stuff, you might as well tell the real stuff. "

" You look at the Barefoot Contessa or Lydia Bastianich, and it's just like watching your mother cooking. "

" Really, the only way to face the biggest problems we have is for the government to change the way they subsidize food. The way we subsidize food makes it cheaper to go to McDonald's and get a hamburger than a salad, and that's insane. "

" If you really taste a doughnut, it's pretty disgusting. They taste of grease. "

" What was so extraordinary to me about going through this box of my mother's letters and diaries was meeting my mother not as my mother, but as a real person. And what breaks my heart is that I had no idea how self-aware she was and how protective of me she was. "