Two key ingredients in any successful chef: a quick learner and someone with a sharp brain.

Put your head down and work hard. Never wait for things to happen, make them happen for yourself through hard graft and not giving up.

I don't like looking back. I'm always constantly looking forward. I'm not the one to sort of sit and cry over spilt milk. I'm too busy looking for the next cow.

Chefs are nutters. They're all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.

Swearing is industry language. For as long as we're alive it's not going to change. You've got to be boisterous to get results.

If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that's exactly what I did.

The minute you start compromising for the sake of massaging somebody's ego, that's it, game over.

Kitchens are hard environments and they form incredibly strong characters.

The problem with Yanks is they are wimps.

There's a bond among a kitchen staff, I think. You spend more time with your chef in the kitchen than you do with your own family.

Push your limit to the absolute extreme.

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.

For a moment, his pupils flickered blue, like there were tiny bathypelagic fish swimming in the deep trenches of his eyeballs.

I'd go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.

Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.

Within my heart is carved a sculpture of your love.

I once truly believed that if I had to stand in line for twenty minutes to have a package gift-wrapped it actually gave the recipient more pleasure.

We have concluded that it is not [science], and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

[If President Bush is right about democracy in Iraq] I may, and I don't know if I can physically do this, implode.

I love dressing up and doing the red carpet every once in a while, but I am very much a jeans kinda girl, so it's all a little embarrassing for me.

If we are honest and fair, then we are known by that. If we are not, alas, we are known by that as well. What we want to do is do right, but you have to say it, you have to show it, and not stop.