David Levi is a teacher as well as a chef, and, like most teachers, he loves to talk.

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency.

I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.

Sometimes I think of blogging as finger exercises for a violinist; sometimes I think of it as mulching a garden. It is incredibly useful and helpful to my "real" writing.

Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

Let nothing human be foreign to me

Everything that has ever happened to me is still all with me.

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.

Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.

For as is often the happenstance with that which is precious and lost, when you find him again, he may well not be quite as you left him.

The greatest test of life is obedience to God.

Reform is a process, and not an event.

It is really really important that you deal with Trump either by letter or by personal contact. Trying to deal with him on telephones or through the media is not a good idea.

I don't like workouts that make you bulky.

I have two hands. I can hold two medals.

to teach without zest is a crime.

It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiencem and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.