Quotes by Anthony Bourdain

Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

Only Texans and Jews understand brisket.

If there was such a thing as building porn, it would be this. Just looking out the window as your drive or trolley by you think, 'I want that. Who lives there? Who lived there? What's it like inside? And where did they go?'

It's beautiful here. They said that of course, that Budapest is beautiful. But it is in fact almost ludicrously beautiful.

You'd have a hard time finding anything better than Barcelona for food, as far as being a hub.

When dealing with complex transportation issues, the best thing to do is pull up with a cold beer and let somebody else figure it out.

I've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime associates, food, for me, has always been an adventure.

For those with restless, curious minds, fascinated by layer upon layer of things, flavors, tastes and customs, which we will never fully be able to understand, Tokyo is deliciously unknowable. I'm sure I could spend the rest of my life there, learn the language, and still die happily ignorant.

The journey is part of the experience -- an expression of the seriousness of one's intent.

I'm not looking to freak people out-eating rodents or bugs. I don't do that anymore.

There is no final resting place of the mind.

People's choice to become vegan, from people I've spoken to, seems motivated by fear.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

I think that if all kids aspire to reach a point where they could feed themselves and a few of their friends, this would be good for the world surely.

Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

Even on the Serengeti, it ain't a barbecue if there ain't some kind of beer.

If you're training in a combat sport, deliciousness takes a backseat.

I'd like to play bass like Bootsy Collins. I'm serious. That would be my dream.

It was not a pretty sight, all these pale, gangly, pimpled youths, in a frenzy of hunger and sexual frustration, shredding bread.

I think it's important if you're going to write a cookbook, it should sound like you talking -- it should be things you actually believe, otherwise I'm not interested.

The cookbooks I value the most in my collection are the ones where you hear the author's voice and point-of-view in every recipe.

Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable, and satisfying. And I'll generally take a stand-up mercenary who takes pride in his professionalism over an artist any day.

Just because we are not Italian, does not mean we cannot appreciate Michelangelo, it is the same with cuisine.

Food, it appeared, could be important. It could be an event. It had secrets.

America's most dangerous export was, is and always will be our fast-food outlets.

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

I won't eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn't a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can't be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.

Free time is my enemy. I recognized early on I'm not a guy who should have a lot of time to contemplate the mysteries of the universe. I need to stay busy... That's just the nature of my demons.

I'm not afraid to look like an idiot on TV.

I think we should increase the minimum wage and I think $15 is a good beginning.

The whole concept of 'the perfect meal' is ludicrous.

I knew already that the best meal in the world, the perfect meal, is very rarely the most sophisticated or expensive one....Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life.

I've been really fortunate in that I guess I was hired to do A Cook's Tour, I was already a known quantity, meaning I had written a really obnoxious book and nobody expected me to be anyone that I wasn't already.

Everything was different now. Everything. I'd not only survived -- I'd enjoyed.

Good food and good eating are about risk. Every once in a while an oyster, for instance, will make you sick to your stomach. Does this mean you should stop eating oysters? No way.

I am very much enjoying the fatherhood phase of my life.

We learn as professionals by repetition, by getting it wrong, getting yelled at and doing it again.

If people are working only rice and beans for much of their diet, it says something.

My daughter takes pride in showing up with stuff that other kids envy or are freaked out by, so I send her to school with grilled octopus.

Just because I like sushi, doesn't mean I can make sushi. I've come to well understand how many years just to get sushi rice correct. It's a discipline that takes years and years and years. So, I leave that to the experts.

Really annoys me any time I see Asian fusion too. Asia is a big place; which Asian are you talking about? You notice it's never Uzbek or Tajik food. It's Thai, and it's generally insulting.

There's something not normal about you if you're writing a book about yourself, or about anything. And if you're the kind of person who can deal with being recognized by strangers and if that's tolerable or pleasing to you, and not immediately terrifying, that's not normal either.

Being on television, being recognizable, this is unnatural.

Most of the time, I'm fighting guys who are 22 years old, former college wrestlers, athletes, kids who are in much better shape than me. Often people who are much bigger and wider than me. It can be dispiriting at first.

I do not have a merchandise line. I don't sell knives or apparel. Though I have been approached to endorse various products from liquor to airlines to automobiles to pharmaceuticals dozens of times, I have managed to resist the temptation.

I'm certainly dismayed by what I'm seeing now. There's a lot of ugliness of a kind I've never seen in my lifetime, or heard in my lifetime. But, look, I'm a romantic. I'm hopeful.

Anything that improves people's expectations of a meal is good for the world. Anything that weans even one kid or one adult away from Chili's or T.G.I. Friday's is definitely a win for the good guys.

I would frankly be shocked if Donald Trump even knows how to use chopsticks or is even able to manipulate them with those tiny little fingers.

I'm a control freak. If you're going to slap my name on something, I would like to control it.

It's been about a week without alcohol of any kind. I'm enjoying my new, clean-living lifestyle.

Thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business, so I can profitably sell crutches later.

I am a delightfully evangelical guy about things I love. I am that annoying guy who sits everyone down and forces them to read some book I like. I'm looking across the full spectrum of genres.

I'm a radical environmentalist; I think the sooner we asphyxiate in our own filth, the better. The world will do better without us. Maybe some fuzzy animals will go with us, but there'll be plenty of other animals, and they'll be back.

Good food does lead to sex. As it should. And in a perfect world, good music does too.

In Italy, kids are taken to restaurants very early, they're welcome there, and they learn how to behave. You don't see a lot of screaming crying kids acting out in a restaurant in Italy. They don't put up with that.

I need the anesthetic qualities of the local fire water.

Those places I don't understand, just doing bad food. It takes some doing. Making good pasta is so much easier than making bad stuff. It actually takes quite an effort to make poor linguine pomodora.

I eat strategically. If I know I'm having a big Chinese banquet tomorrow, I'm not eating a big dinner tonight, and I'm not having breakfast.

I have the best job in the world.

I'm not going anywhere. I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

A burger is something anyone can do, just follow the rules.

Cooking breakfast and brunch professionally really kind of ruined breakfast service for me for a long time.

We knew well how much these people were paying for cocaine -- and that the more coke cost, the more people wanted it. We applied the same market plan to our budding catering operation, along with a similar pricing structure, and business was suddenly very, very, good.

I think of street food as the antidote to fast food; it's the clear alternative to the king, the clown and the colonel.

If I'm training I'm cutting weight for a competition. I'm hard. I'm pretty much eating animal protein and that's it. No rice, no beans, certainly no sweets.

When do you stop to de-douche?

Where once they used to say, 'Cocaine is God's way of saying you have too much money' -- now, maybe EDM is. Come ye lords and princelings of douchedom.

The older I get, and the more I travel in particular, the less I care about what exactly is in the dish than who's cooking it and why.

Anyone who's a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: Is it good? Does it give pleasure?

Look at your waiter's face. He knows. It's another reason to be polite to your waiter: he could save your life with a raised eyebrow or a sigh.

A proper saute pan should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone else's skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent, the victim's head or your pan, then throw that pan right in the trash.

I can't do exercises regularly because my schedule changes from day to day. I'm okay with hurting myself, like I'll lift something until it hurts, but I don't want to pass out or vomit in front of people.

I love New York. I'm a guy for whom a New York accent is a comforting thing.

I'd like to make a show with Keith Richards.

Never try to get your kid to eat anything she doesn't already want to eat. Just eat interesting stuff in front of her while completely ignoring her. Never, ever suggest try it. Never say those dreaded words try it, it's good. Or worse, It's good for you. That'll poison the well.

Cream rises. Excellence does have its rewards.

Good food and good eating are about risk.

I don't have to agree with you to like you or respect you.

Don't lie about it. You made a mistake. Admit it and move on. Just don't do it again. Ever.

Margarine? That's not food. I Can't Believe It's Not Butter? I can. If you're planning on using margarine in anything, you can stop reading now, because I won't be able to help you.

Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have.

I'm sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you're confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.

If I were trapped in one city and had to eat one nation's cuisine for the rest of my life, I would not mind eating Japanese. I adore Japanese food. I love it.

When you're training for jiu-jitsu, particularly if you're training for a competition, you have to be pretty prescribed in the variety of what you eat.

The bible of cooking. The all-time argument ender. Early in my cooking career, I wielded my Larousse like a weapon and it never let me down.

When I die, I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered.

Naturally, I'm misanthropic. But the Negronis are helping considerably.

As Americans, we tend to look at Mexican food as nachos, which is not Mexican food really -- they don't eat them.

I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living -- all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents.

One of my few virtues -- I don't have a lot of them -- would be a deep sense of curiosity. I'm interested in how other people live in other places; I'm interested in other cultures.

What's the opposite of suck? Un-suck?

Maybe that's enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom...is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go. -Anthony Bourdain.

I wouldn't want to compare myself to David Byrne whom I consider a genius, but what I think what we have in common is that he's also a guy who is very interested in the world and who has a lot of passions beyond singing and playing guitar.

The ingredients of a hamburger seldom vary. It's a percentage of fat to lean meat, add salt and prepare and that's it. It shouldn't need a recipe.

I am not a fan of people who abuse service staff. In fact, I find it intolerable. It's an unpardonable sin as far as I'm concerned, taking out personal business or some other kind of dissatisfaction on a waiter or busboy.

I'd learned something... Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me... and others. This was valuable information.

I'm a guy who should not have a lot of free time. But when it comes to vacation, I like to pull the plug completely. It's all about my daughter -- I'm no longer the star of my own movie.

When dealing with complex transportation issues, the best thing to do is pull up with a cold beer and let somebody else figure it out.

I'm really happy to see Filipino cuisine starting to really take hold outside of the Pinoy community.

Do you really want to make risotto to order when you have eight guests sitting there? No. It won't work. Most cookbooks won't tell you that. They will say make it and it will come out perfectly. They should tell you you're probably going to screw it up the first 10 times you make it.

I go anywhere I want, do whatever I want when I get there, they let me make self-indulgent TV about that experience, and give me about as much creative freedom as anyone's ever had in the history of television.

I write quickly with a sense of urgency. I don't edit myself out of existence, meaning I'll try to write 50 or 60 pages before I start rereading, revising and editing. That just helps with my confidence.

We now have a generation of people who in many cases feel that if they become chefs, they'll get a TV show. They have a signature haircut, a year into the business, or a branding arrangement with a shoe company. I don't really relate to that. I guess this is the world we live in now.

I'm away 250 days a year. It's a tough situation.

As you move through this life...you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life -- and travel -- leaves marks on you.

I think it's a universal truth that most chefs I know are happiest eating simple, unadorned good things.

I was a serious comic collector and fanboy as a kid. I wanted very badly to draw comic books for a lot of my childhood and early adolescence. So when you have an unfulfilled dream like that, when years later you find yourself in a position to make a graphic novel -- hell yeah, I'm going to do that.

If you go to working class, and working poor areas of America, the food sources that are relegated to them are generally limited to unhealthy ones.

My French definitely improves the more I drink, as I worry less and less about absolutely perfect grammar. I do speak and understand the language, just not particularly well.

At the end of a dinner at my house, my kitchen sink is filled with dishes and there's nothing pretty about the garbage.

Very few restaurant workers could even dream of eating in the restaurants they work in. Many do not make a living wage.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

I managed to reach a depth of self-loathing that usually takes a night of drinking to achieve.

Unlicensed hooch from a stranger in a parking lot. Good idea? Yes, of course it is.

I like cooking pasta. Maybe it's that I always wanted to be Italian American in some dark part of my soul; maybe I get off on that final squirt of emulsifying extra virgin, just after the basil goes in, I don't know.

To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things -- and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.

Learn how to cook a (effing) omelet. I mean, what nicer thing can you do for somebody than make them breakfast? You look good doing it, and it's a nice thing to do for somebody you just had sex with.

For their own good, vegetarians should never be allowed near fine beers and ales. It will only make them loud and belligerent, and they lack the physical strength and aggressive nature to back up any drunken assertions.

I'm not going to get off the pony as long as they let me ride it.

If people are eating mostly pickles after many generations, where did that come from? It's reflective of history, often a painful history. It's central to a culture, to a history, to a personal story. It's communication at its most fundamental.

Since the very beginning, Emeril's had a sense of humor about me calling him names and poking fun at him.

You have to love a town where you can both smoke and gamble in a pharmacy.

There's something wonderful about drinking in the afternoon. A not-too-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar -- even in this fake-ass Irish pub.

The celebrity-chef thing, even at its worst, its most annoying, its silliest, its goofiest, its most egregious and cynical, has been a good thing.

The world they live in now is in no way the world the Michelin system was set up to evaluate back in France, which was all about motorists and seeing if it was worth driving an extra 50 miles for a restaurant. It's a silly thing. Why do you want to help a tire company? You don't owe them nothing.

You dropped a 500-seat deuce on Times Square.

If you go to chefs all across America and ask them, 'What's your biggest problem right now?,' It is finding people to cook in their restaurants. They're having an enormous, countrywide problem here staffing their operations.

Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.

A good, stinky French cheese or a good Stilton. These are things I really, really love. Dessert I can obviously live without.

I don't think people should be encouraged to look like Kate Moss; I think that's unreasonable. I think the normal human body should be glorified. By the same token, if you need a stick to wash yourself, you're not healthy.

Look, getting bullied in school and coming home crying in the rain and my mom making me a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup with some oysterettes. It was comfort food; that is what food should be.

There are very sophisticated, very time-consuming dishes to prepare; always from scratch, and always in excess of what you could possibly need. You tend to kill your guests with kindness around here.

Italy is hard to beat. It's a family-friendly experience, they like to see kids in restaurants, and at dinner you see all the adults at the table and all the kids at the other end of the table. Maybe they run off and go play.

The fact of the matter is that, for years, the restaurant and service industry has been, to a great extent, built on the backs of often underpaid immigrants of often dubious legal status.

Recognise excellence. Celebrate weirdness and innovation. Oddballs should be cherished, if they can do something other people can't do.

I couldn't imagine a more unreliable, more unprofitable way to make a living than writing. My advice? Show up, do the best you can. Keep your day job. If you get a lucky break, don't f*** up. It was helpful to be older because I had made all the really stupid mistakes already.

I could eat bloody Elvis -- if you put enough vinegar on him.

When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you've been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you've got Type 2 Diabetes... It's in bad taste if nothing else.

I believe -- to the best of my recollection, anyway -- that I soon made the classic error of moving from margaritas to actual shots of straight tequila. It does make it easier to meet new people.

Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime...Please, treat your garlic with respect...Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.

Southeast Asia has a real grip on me. From the very first time I went there, it was a fulfillment of my childhood fantasies of the way travel should be.

I'm really happy to see the explosion of interest in Korean food, and this hybrid Korean-American food.

For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we're confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.

There has ling been a happy symbiotic relationship between kitchen and bar. Simply put, the kitchen wants booze, and the bartender wants food.

As an art form, cooktalk is, like haiku or kabuki, defined by established rules, with a rigid, traditional framework in which one may operate.

The life of the cook was a life of adventure, looting, pillaging and rock-and-rolling through life with a carefree disregard for all conventional morality. It looked pretty damn good to me on the other side of the line.

Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.

I'm not impressed by any cooks who can brag about a filet mignon. A guy who can take the neck of a shank or can use tripe to make into something delicious is really interesting to me; that's impressive.

Only desperation can account for what the Chinese do in the name of 'medicine.' That's something you might remind your New Age friends who've gone gaga over 'holistic medicine' and 'alternative Chinese cures.

When you're shooting that fast end to end, you wake up in a hotel and you don't know where you are. You're dreaming of Singapore, you wake up in Hong Kong. Or you just lose track. It's one of the reasons I'm staying in hotels that I know I've stayed in before, and they don't look like other hotels.

Nobody in Singapore drinks Singapore Slings. It's one of the first things you find out there. What you do in Singapore is eat. It's a really food-crazy culture, where all of this great food is available in a kind of hawker-stand environment.

This is the dream of all the world. The dream is to live in Granada. You know, work in the morning, have a one-hour in the afternoon, at night go out and have that life. You know. Go out and see your friends and eat tapa and drink red wine and be in a beautiful place.

Venezuela is another place I'd like very much to go, which is proving very difficult. I have not been there to make a show and I'd like to, very much.

What you're going to be eating in the next year is decided by chefs. If the consensus is that pot-bellies are in next season, that's what's on your plate. And I think that's a good thing, because we know, obviously, about food.

I'm very proud of the Rome episode of 'No Reservations' because it violated all the conventional wisdom about making television. You're never, ever supposed to do a food or travel show in black and white.

What is left of the poor? Try to buy a fresh f**king vegetable in West Baltimore. It is a not completely inconceivable scenario in the future, we'll all look like that... Waddling from convenience store to fast food outlet, chewing mindlessly on 99 cent hamburgers.

And now to sleep, to dream...perchance to fart.

There is no other place on earth even remotely like New Orleans. Don't even try to compare it to anywhere else.

Glasgow is maybe the most bullshit-free place on earth. I think I call it the antidote to the rest of the world.

It's so unapologetically working class and attitude-free. Everyone's looking to take the piss out of you, as they put it. They're all comedians, and tough. They don't put on airs.

They're professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don't forget that the Russians -- any Russian -- can drink you under the table.

I admire vegetarians who refuse to eat nothing but vegetables in their homes, but I also admire those who put aside those principles or those preferences when they travel. Just to be a good guest.

New Orleans is a glorious mutation.

I'm excited by any food that's prepared by someone who's proud of what they're doing, who puts a personal imprint on food.

This is the dream of all the world. The dream is to live in Granada. You know, work in the morning, have a one-hour nap in the afternoon, and at night go out and have that life. Go out and see your friends and eat tapas and drink red wine and be in a beautiful place.

In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.

You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.

Turning your nose up at a genuine and sincere gesture of hospitality is no way to travel or to make friends around the world.

Without Montreal, Canada would be hopeless.

Without new ideas success can become stale.

I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime.

When my father passed, I was still an unsuccessful cook with a drug problem. I was in my mid-thirties, standing behind an oyster bar, cracking clams for a living when he died. So, he never saw me complete a book or achieve anything of note. I would have liked to have shared this with him.

It's that show Friends. Ruined coffee forever.

To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.

Street food, I believe, is the salvation of the human race.