A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.

Excellence is about fighting and pursuing something diligently, with a strict and determined approach to doing it right. It's okay if there are flaws in the process - it makes it more interesting.

You have to be critical of what you do every day, to analyze it and be willing to push it further.

I love faltering. I love, in a sense, coming up short. Because you learn nothing from success. You learn so much from failing.

The art of cooking is among the most intimate things that we can do for another.

Chefs, as a whole, say yes to any project, fundraiser, or tasting because they have such a generous spirit.

I’m all about making money. It’s the greatest thing, because it means you get money to spend.

Fernand Point's philosophy instilled what cuisine is all about: generosity and hugeness of heart.

My fantasy is to have a restaurant where there are no written menus, but where you just ask people, What are you in the mood for? Fish? Meat? White wine?

It's a challenge to demonstrate that you can prepare some really interesting food with humble ingredients.

Cuisine is only about making foods taste the way they are supposed to taste.

The two events were probably unrelated, but both jolted Dave the way a sudden air pocket reminds nervous passengers that they’re soaring above the clouds in a pressurized metal tube.

Overstimulation has been the real drawback. I need to find ways to stop thinking about analysis of algorithms, in order to do various other things that human beings ought to do.

Why should I deem myself to be a chisel when I could be the artist?

O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.

Music is so important. It changes thinking, it influences everybody, whether they know it or not. Music knows no boundary lines.

It is wonderful to be despised, if, deep down, we know we are right.

I do not think that my spiritual apprehensions are as dogmatically cultural as those of many people who have been brought up strictly in a particular tradition.

Generally, the greater the stigma or revulsion, the better the bargain.

We know that our senses are subject to decay, that from our middle years they are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if we didn't know and didn't believe.