"Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down."

"We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day."

"The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it."

"I was at a party, and some squiggly looking dude with a bow tie came up and said, 'How'd you like to be on TV?' Turns out he was the programming guy at the Food Network. They had me come into the office, and I did a 'Ready, Set, Cook' with Emeril Lagasse, I believe."

"Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools."

"I find I have to give myself a day when I just shut myself off and do nothing but read."

"I have a huge author crush on Stephen King. Have never met him. Would probably embarrass myself. But it would be worth it."

"I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience."