Anthony Bourdain Quotes

Life is complicated. It's filled with nuance. It's unsatisfying. If I believe in anything, it is doubt.

When I finally leave the market, the streets are dark, and I pass a few blocks where not a single electric light appears – only dark open storefronts and coms (fast-food eateries), broom closet-sized restaurants serving fish, meat, and rice for under a dollar, flickering candles barely revealing the silhouettes of seated figures. The tide of cyclists, motorbikes, and scooters has increased to an uninterrupted flow, a river that, given the slightest opportunity, diverts through automobile traffic, stopping it cold, spreads into tributaries that spill out over sidewalks, across lots, through filling stations. They pour through narrow openings in front of cars: young men, their girlfriends hanging on the back; families of four: mom, dad, baby, and grandma, all on a fragile, wobbly, underpowered motorbike; three people, the day’s shopping piled on a rear fender; women carrying bouquets of flapping chickens, gathered by their feet while youngest son drives and baby rests on the handlebars; motorbikes carrying furniture, spare tires, wooden crates, lumber, cinder blocks, boxes of shoes. Nothing is too large to pile onto or strap to a bike. Lone men in ragged clothes stand or sit by the roadsides, selling petrol from small soda bottles, servicing punctures with little patch kits and old bicycle pumps.

John F. Kennedy said something truly terrifying — guaranteed to make every parent’s blood run cold: “To have a child is to give fate a hostage.

Shepherd's pie'? 'Chili special'? Sounds like leftovers to me. How about swordfish? I like it fine. But my seafood purveyor, when he goes out to dinner, won't eat it. He's seen too many of those 3-foot-long parasitic worms that riddle the fish's flesh.

Most of us are lucky to see Paris once in a lifetime. Make the most of it by doing as little as possible. Walk a little, get lost a bit, eat, catch a breakfast buzz, have a nap, try and have sex if you can, just not with a mime. Eat again. Lounge around drinking coffee. Maybe read a book. Drink some wine, walk around a bit more, eat, repeat. See? It’s easy.

In another telling anomaly of the meat-grinding business, many of the larger slaughterhouses will sell their product only to grinders who agree to not test their product for E. coli contamination — until after it's run through a grinder with a whole bunch of other meat from other sources...It's like demanding of a date that she have unprotected sex with four or five other guys immediately before sleeping with you — just so she can't point the finger directly at you should she later test positive for clap.

I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able — if called upon to do so — to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world. Perhaps omelet skills should be learned at the same time you learn to fuck. Perhaps there should be an unspoken agreement that in the event of loss of virginity, the more experienced of the partners should, afterward, make the other an omelet — passing along the skill at an important and presumably memorable moment.

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

What most people don't get about professional-level cooking is that it is not all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavours and textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking - the real business of preparing the food you eat - is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way.

You know, I'll tell you honestly: if you like food and you haven't come here to eat, you're really missing the fucking boat. This is world-class food; this is world-class wine; this is world-class cheese. The next big thing is Croatia. If you haven't been here, you're a fucking idiot. I'm an idiot.

Spend any time in the real Italy, however, and you quickly realize that Italians don’t really pick grapes much anymore, and they certainly don’t stomp them either. They don’t pick tomatoes — or olives — and they don’t shear their sheep. Their tomatoes and olives are picked largely by underpaid Africans and Eastern Europeans, seasonal hires, brought in for that purpose — who are then demonized and complained about for the rest of the year. (Except when blowing motorists in the offseason — as can be readily observed on the outskirts of even the smallest Italian communities these days.)

What’s the most frightening thing to a child? The pain of being the outsider, of looking ridiculous to others, of being teased or picked on in school. Every child burns with fear at the prospect. It’s a primal instinct: to belong. McDonald’s has surely figured this out — along with what specific colors appeal to small children, what textures, and what movies or TV shows are likely to attract them to the gray disks of meat. They feel no compunction harnessing the fears and unarticulated yearnings of small children, and nor shall I. “Ronald has cooties,” I say — every time he shows up on television or out the window of the car. “And you know,” I add, lowering my voice, “he smells bad, too. Kind of like … poo!” (I am, I should say, careful to use the word “alleged” each and every time I make such an assertion, mindful that my urgent whisperings to a two-year-old might be wrongfully construed as libelous.) “If you hug Ronald … can you get cooties?” asks my girl, a look of wide-eyed horror on her face. “Some say … yes,” I reply — not wanting to lie — just in case she should encounter the man at a child’s birthday party someday. It’s a lawyerly answer — but effective. “Some people talk about the smell, too… I’m not saying it rubs off on you or anything — if you get too close to him — but…” I let that hang in the air for a while. “Ewwww!!!” says my daughter. We sit in silence as she considers this, then she asks, “Is it true that if you eat a hamburger at McDonald’s it can make you a ree-tard? I laugh wholeheartedly at this one and give her a hug. I kiss her on the forehead reassuringly. “Ha. Ha. Ha. I don’t know where you get these ideas!” I may or may not have planted that little nugget a few weeks ago, allowing her little friend Tiffany at ballet class to “overhear” it as I pretended to talk on my cell phone.

The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca.

Be a fool. For love. For yourself. What you think MIGHT possibly make you happy — even for a little while — whatever the cost or good sense might dictate.

There’s that old joke, I’ve referred to it before, where the guy at the bar asks the girl if she’d fuck him for a million dollars — and she thinks about it and finally replies, “Well, I guess for a million dollars, yeah…” At which point he quickly offers her a dollar for the same service. “Fuck you!” she says, declining angrily. “You think I’d fuck you for a dollar? What do you think I am?” To which the guy says, “Well … we’ve already established you’re a whore. Now we’re just haggling over the price.