What has impressed me the most about the Italians whose tables we've sat at is that they are traditional cooks but also outrageously innovative. These people are wild improvisers.

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

Your eyes should never be lent to the devil

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?

'One Night Only,' the words I'll be hearing from my agents when I tell them I'm coming back to Broadway.

Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.

The republican party is my vehicle, not my master.

Reason cannot save us, nothing can; but reason can mitigate the cruelty of living.

Starting a business is a huge amount of hard work... You had better enjoy it.

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didnt: It was basically a semantics game.

Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act.