My biggest challenge is cooking traditional French dishes, which usually require very specific techniques and methods. That’s just not my style... I cook from the soul.

I like to cook with the philosophy of using great ingredients and not altering them too much.

I wanted to get away from the Mexican vernacular and do more 'nuevo Latino.' Americans are starting to understand regionality in Mexican food. It is very regional in terms of ingredients.

Latin food suffers like Chinese. You can do marginal Chinese and be successful. You can do crappy Mexican and be packed.

Nobody likes sweaty coleslaw.

I was a little, uh, incorrigible as a kid, so the kitchen was a good place to give me structure and balance. It taught me hard work, but then I grew to love it.

When we blindly accept an idea, a thought, or a dogma, we become blind.

If you don't infuse humor into a subject matter, no matter how dark, the audience can't accept the message of a film. It closes them down. Humor can open them up.

I'm not that beautiful, and I don't want to be a pop star.

To me, sweat is workout bliss.

No country will reach its full potential if its female citizens do not enjoy full equality.

Weekdays, New York City's financial district bustles with activity. Its streets are rivers of rushing humanity, its air is thick with the sounds of traffic.

I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.

Thank God I have the things that my mother and father taught me, the things that I've learned from pastors and spiritual teachers and the books that I read.

Poor Capablanca! Thou wert a brilliant technician, but no philosopher. Thou wert not capable of believing that in chess, another style could be victorious than the absolutely correct one.

I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a congress.