Anthony Bourdain
The cooking profession, while it's a noble craft and a noble calling, 'cause you're doing something useful - you're feeding people, you're nurturing them, you're providing sustenance - it was never pure.
I wasn't that great a chef, and I don't think I'm that great a writer.
It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.
I don't like to see animals in pain. That was very uncomfortable to me. I don't like factory farming. I'm not an advocate for the meat industry.
I'm not searching for hard news; I'm not a journalist, but I'm interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it's a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven't flinched.
If you get an opportunity to work with David Simon, anybody with good taste would.
When I'm doing a book tour in the States, I'll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don't know where I am right away. I'll go to the window, and it doesn't help there either, especially if you're in an anonymous strip and it's the usual Victoria's Secret, Gap, Chili's, Applebee's.
I did go into the Amazonian region of Brazil. They have prehistoric river fish that weigh in at around 600 pounds, which you don't see anywhere else. And foods that cannot be exported or even found in other parts of Brazil.
I love New York. I'm a guy for whom a New York accent is a comforting thing.
I try to very hard to avoid a situation where I would be eating cat or dog; I've managed to gracefully avoid that. It's hypocritical of me and an arbitrary line, but one that I have managed to avoid crossing.
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 a control freak. If you're going to slap my name on something, I would like to control it.
I'm not afraid to look like a big, hairy, smelly, foreign devil in Tokyo, though I do my best not to, I really do.
Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.Collection: Life
If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.Collection: Travel
As you move through this life...you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you.Collection: Travel
your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.Collection: Food
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.Collection: Mean
Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have.Collection: Character
Recognise excellence. Celebrate weirdness and innovation. Oddballs should be cherished, if they can do something other people can't do.Collection: People
Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.Collection: Food
Good food does lead to sex. As it should. And in a perfect world, good music does too.Collection: Sex
[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.Collection: Hurt
I don't have to agree with you to like you or respect you.Collection: Admiration And Respect
Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.Collection: Jobs
Regret is something you’ve got to just live with, you can’t drink it away. You can’t run away from it. You can’t trick yourself out of it. You’ve just got to own it.Collection: Running
Everything important I learned, I learned as a dishwasher.Collection: Important
We learn as professionals by repetition, by getting it wrong, getting yelled at and doing it again.Collection: Repetition
Naturally, I'm misanthropic. But the Negronis are helping considerably.Collection: Helping
That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.Collection: Food
I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.Collection: Travel
Street food, I believe, is the salvation of the human race.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Please Me
I admire people who do things that are interesting to them, who don't have a strategy or a master plan or have a brand - I don't care about any of those things.Collection: People
In that sense, what a great way to live, if you could always do things that interest you, and do them with people who interest you.Collection: People
I'm away 250 days a year. It's a tough situation.Collection: Years
I think there's a great storytelling tradition in the restaurant business that tends to attract people with an oral tradition of bulls - ting and bollocking. Creative people, people for whom the 9-to-5 world is not attractive or impossible. It seems that way. There are a lot of stories in the business, and a lot of characters - and it seems to attract its share of artists and writers and people who hope to do something creative in their lives.Collection: Character
It's wrong I think, morally and annoying in general, to try to get a kid to be a foodie, so I never even suggested, "Hey baby it's good, maybe you should try it." That never worked for me.Collection: Baby
It's not normal, what I do. Just being on television isn't.Collection: Television
Theres no hope, none, of ever talking about it without pissing somebody, if not everybody, off...By the end of this hour I will be seen by many as a terrorist sympathizer, a Zionist tool. A self-hating Jew, an apologist for American imperialism, an orientalist, socialist, fascist, CIA agent, and worse.Collection: Hate
Don't touch my d**k, don't touch my knife.Collection: Food
Turning your nose up at a genuine and sincere gesture of hospitality is no way to travel or to make friends around the world.Collection: Noses
Norman Mailer described the desire to be cool as a "decision to encourage the psychopath in oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Book
When do you stop to de-douche?Collection: Douches
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.Collection: Athlete
I think as a moral question, restaurant workers should get paid more.Collection: Thinking
I'm really happy to see the explosion of interest in Korean food, and this hybrid Korean-American food.Collection: Korean Food
Silly trends don't last long. A lot of this nonsense that pops up, I don't even really pay attention because it'll be gone in a flash.Collection: Silly