The hardest part of anything is making a dish consistently great - you order it seven years later, if it's still on the menu, and it's still as good as what you remember.

We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day.

There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria.

If you want your kids to listen to you, don't yell at them. Whisper. Make them lean in. My kids taught me that. And I do it with adults now.

I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.

When I was a child, our whole family cooked. All my cousins cooked. All my aunts and uncles cooked. It was part of our heritage.

The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it.

I got some media coverage for using the tail, the ear, the oink.

Close your eyes and place your finger on a map. Wherever it lands, that's the theme of the evening. So many times we settle for routine dishes. This forces you to try new cuisines.

Chefs don't actually say 'That's a spicy meat-a-ball,' except to indicate that there's a bomb threat in the restaurant without alarming the customers. Terrorism is the spiciest meatball there is.

The kitchen really is the castle itself. This is where we spend our happiest moments and where we find the joy of being a family.

If what you want does not exist, why not create it?

When you make a man ashamed, you make him dangerous.

Don't give me any money, don't give me any people, but give freedom, and I'll give you a movie that looks gigantic.

Don't make me regret this", I said breathless. "You haven't regretted me once.

Sincerity and honesty carry one through many difficulties which all the arts he can invent would never help him through.

I'd much rather be a one-hit wonder than a phony.

When I was growing up, I always knew that if I ever got anything, I was going to give back as much as I can. I learned that all you have to be willing to do is give your time.

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

As time passes, I feel more and more a sense of acting being a fundamental part of who I am.

It is an ideology born out of hatred and its adherents belong to no religion, culture or civilisation.