I'm convinced that the main reason we've become so obsessed with restaurants is due to our basic need to get out of virtual space and into a real one. We're not going out to eat merely to share food; we're there to sit at the same table together, slow down, breathe the same air.

I've been to a couple of restaurants in L.A. that were so loud, I left there with a sore throat; you literally could not have a conversation. I think it's very deliberate: There's this idea that somehow it's more fun if there's a roar in the room.

There is an almost anti-epicurean tradition at the very base of America. For much of the middle part of American history, people who wanted to overcome that went to France.

I once ate nothing but grapefruit for an entire month. I didn't lose a pound.

My idea of good living is not about eating high on the hog. Rather, to me, good living means understanding how food connects us to the earth.

The way we live is changing. Each year, our free time shrinks a little more as computers clamor for an increasing percentage of our attention.

The American government policy on what we supported and subsidised in agriculture was a social experiment on a whole generation of children.

When you're a restaurant critic, you're not home at night, so breakfast became really important for us.

I don't care what a lot of anonymous strangers think about restaurants.

I think I wrote my first piece about food in 1978.

I don't think there's one thing more important you can do for your kids than have family dinner.

I bake bread nearly every day; I use Jim Lahey's no-knead method and leave it to rise overnight.

When I ate slowly and deliberately, giving myself time to consider whether I actually wanted that next bite, I often discovered that I didn't.

I like poached eggs, but I'll make scrambled or fried or whatever anybody wants.

Given a choice between great food and boring company or boring food and great company, I'll take the great company any day.

I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.

If you go back in American history, oysters were the food of poor people. New York was filled with oyster saloons in the 1800s.

Reading an audio book is a very odd experience because there are three people sitting out there while you're reading in this glass booth, and you can see their reactions.

I loved writing fiction. I mean, once I found the character, or the characters, and knew who they were and knew their back-stories, it really - I mean, I went into my studio every day, thinking, 'What's gonna happen to Billy today?'

Laos is a country where everything is eaten. When I came back, I would find myself chopping parsley and thinking: 'Why am I throwing these stems away? They're perfectly edible.'

I think it's part of the DNA of human beings. We are a cooking animal. What differentiates us from all the other animals is that we cook and they don't.

People are so used to eating terrible pancakes, no matter how you mess up, they're going to be great. And if you make fresh orange juice, they'll be over the moon.

American food is the food of immigrants. You go back a couple of hundred years, and we were all immigrants, unless we're going to talk about Native American cuisine.

I learned so much in Laos. I learned that fried silkworm larvae are delicious. I learned how to make ant-egg salad.