Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To taste fully is to live fully.
I'm not a foodie - I'm an eater: I'm hungry.
To eat passionately is to allow the world in.
Characters who don't suffer have no interest to me.
Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency.
Finding my way into a novel is always half the battle.
In literature, older women are not often given center stage.
In the aftermath of a marriage, you feel helpless and hapless.
Iggy Pop is God, if God looked half that good with his shirt off.
I've never been an outward rebel, but inside, I just rebel deeply.
David Levi is a teacher as well as a chef, and, like most teachers, he loves to talk.
It's really hard for me, every day, to confront my writing. It never gets easier over time.
Food is not a means toward resolution. It can't cure heartbreak or solve untenable dilemmas.
I've always written about adultery because it raises the question of transgression and trouble.
Chan Marshall has one of the most haunting, wrenching voices of any current singer, male or female.
It makes you vulnerable to win an award. It's nice to get the attention, but your neck is stuck out.
I wanted to write a food book, but I'm not a chef or an expert on culinary matters, to put it mildly.
'Blue Plate Special' is the autobiography of my first half-century of life, with food as the subject.
Broccoli gets such a bad rap. This is perplexing to those of us who love that green, treelike, stalky vegetable.
The male muse is an unaccountably rare thing in art. Where does that leave female artists looking for inspiration?
Broccoli, when overboiled, produces a sulfuric stench that causes children to gag the instant they enter the house.
Therapists have tremendous power over their vulnerable clients, and it is very easy to take advantage of this power.
Often I choose characters who express not my best self, but the sides of me I haven't developed or haven't expressed.
It gives me immense pleasure to be trustworthy, faithful, and true - to have the kind of romantic bond that inspires this.
I never see myself as writing satire. I think I write about people as they really are, without making them better or worse.
Nostalgia is a powerful drug. Under its influence, ordinary songs take on dimensions and powers, like emotional superheroes.
A relative of poison ivy and poison sumac, the cashew contains the same rash-inducing chemicals, known as urushiols, as its kin.
Ham is undoubtedly one of the most universally beloved of meats, at least in those parts of the world where it's not prohibited.
I procrastinate all morning. That's when I get my office work done and answer e-mails and see what's on the Internet and do laundry.
I wrote my first novel in eighth grade for a boy named Kenny on whom I had an unrequited crush and who sat behind me in social studies.
I never liked dolls or played house. I read and wrote, climbed trees, collected rocks, rode my bike, and befriended boys, platonically.
Most of all, I love unfussy, unpretentious, simple food made with excellent ingredients. If I'm a snob, it's about quality, not cuisine.
I started reading G. K. Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday' on a subway ride, almost missed my stop, and walked home thumbing pages.
If there's a rift in the marriage - if someone feels neglected, frustrated, tempted by others, or unsure - then trouble can easily arise.
In a family of all girls, I was always the 'boy' in my mind - the protector, the masculine one. No one would ever have to worry about me.
I think there's a part of my brain where food, language, and memory all intersect, and it's really powerful. I think I'm not alone in this.
The phrase 'blue plate special' has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic phrases in the English language for me.
Country ham is baked whole, usually with a glaze, sometimes studded with cloves, and served as the centerpiece of Christmas and Easter feasts.
My favorite way to cook a clam is in chowder. I was a New Yorker for 20 years, and I always loved tomato-based, celery-heavy Manhattan chowders.
Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.
If you've got cockles, those nickel-size, heart-shaped mollusks, and you want to get fancy, steam them, then toss the meat in finely ground cornmeal.
I think my blog is fairly circumspect and elliptical. I've written personal essays, but they are short and to the point: in and out, and that's that.
There's almost nothing you can't do with a cashew. Not only does it lend its nutty sweetness to savory dishes, it also gives desserts a deep richness.
I realized that I've had a really rocky relationship with food - it has not been a gauzy, beautiful summer of ripe melons and perfectly buttered toast.
I left New York in 2009 when I fell in love with someone who had a farmhouse in New Hampshire... Portland, Maine, felt like the inevitable place for us.
For writers and artists, it's always a balancing act between wanting to be the center of attention and wanting to be invisible and watch what's going on.
I have observed, through many years of living in north Brooklyn, that people, for example an ostensible group of friends, can be dangerous to one another.
I grew up in an all-female family - two sisters and a mostly single mother - and we often bonded, in part, by disparaging men and feeling superior to them.
In the winter of 2012, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to write what turned into my autobiography, a look at my own life through the lens of food.
Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked.