Top 100 Anthony Bourdain Quotes
#1. It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.
Anthony Bourdain
#2. I don't snack. I don't generally eat sweets or drink soda. I never eat between meals or even before big ones.
Anthony Bourdain
#3. You'd have a hard time finding anything better than Barcelona for food, as far as being a hub. Given a choice between Barcelona and San Sebastian to die in, I'd probably want to die in San Sebastian.
Anthony Bourdain
#4. I always entertain the notion that I'm wrong, or that I'll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.
Anthony Bourdain
#5. My last semester at Vassar, I'd taken to wearing nunchakus in a strap-on holster and carrying around a samurai sword - that should tell you all you need to know.
Anthony Bourdain
#6. I managed to reach a depth of self-loathing that usually takes a night of drinking to achieve.
Anthony Bourdain
#7. Every chef I know, their cholesterol is through the roof. And mine's not so great.
Anthony Bourdain
#8. Thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business, so I can profitably sell crutches later.
Anthony Bourdain
#9. And I've long believed that good food, good eating is all about risk.
Anthony Bourdain
#10. People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice ... they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.
Anthony Bourdain
#11. [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.
Anthony Bourdain
#12. As a chef I'm not your dietitian or your ethicist, I'm in the pleasure business.
Anthony Bourdain
#13. I was a serious comic collector and fanboy as a kid. I wanted very badly to draw comic books for a lot of my childhood and early adolescence. So when you have an unfulfilled dream like that, when years later you find yourself in a position to make a graphic novel - hell yeah, I'm going to do that.
Anthony Bourdain
#15. I don't have to agree with you to like you or respect you.
Anthony Bourdain
#16. Is there a sharper commentary on American culture and the world than The Simpsons?
Anthony Bourdain
#17. My love for chaos, conspiracy and the dark side of human nature colors the behavior of my charges, most of whom are already living near the fringes of acceptable conduct.
Anthony Bourdain
#18. I look at Guy Fieri and I just think, 'Jesus, I'm glad that's not me.'
Anthony Bourdain
#20. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.
Anthony Bourdain
#21. I'm a comic nerd. I'm a former serious collector for much of my childhood and early teen years I wanted to draw underground comics.
Anthony Bourdain
#22. I'm a control freak. If you're going to slap my name on something, I would like to control it.
Anthony Bourdain
#23. Only one in four has a chance at making it ... And right there, I knew that if one of us was getting off dope, and staying off dope, it was going to be me. I was going to live. I was the guy.
Anthony Bourdain
#24. I won't eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn't a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can't be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.
Anthony Bourdain
#25. People's choice to become vegan, from people I've spoken to, seems motivated by fear.
Anthony Bourdain
#26. I've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime 'associates,' food, for me, has always been an adventure
Anthony Bourdain
#27. Our movements through time and space seem somehow trivial compared to a heap of boiled meat in broth, the smell of saffron, garlic, fishbones and Pernod.
Anthony Bourdain
#28. My mom had Julia Child and 'The Fannie Farmer Cookbook' on top of the refrigerator, and she had a small repertoire of French dishes.
Anthony Bourdain
#29. Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.
Anthony Bourdain
#30. A proper saute pan, for instance, should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone's skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent - the victim's head or your pan - then throw that pan right in the trash.
Anthony Bourdain
#31. There are very sophisticated, very time-consuming dishes to prepare; always from scratch, and always in excess of what you could possibly need. You tend to kill your guests with kindness around here.
Anthony Bourdain
#33. I love the masochistic aspect of eating seething, real Sichuan food in Sichuan Province.
Anthony Bourdain
#34. I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times.
Anthony Bourdain
#35. If somebody crafts an interesting tweet that'll lead me to their blog, I'm going to their blog.
Anthony Bourdain
#36. I could do one show after another in China for the rest of my life and still die ignorant. There's a lot of places left to go.
Anthony Bourdain
#37. I'm not looking to freak people out - eating rodents or bugs. I don't do that anymore.
Anthony Bourdain
#38. The worst, most dangerous person to America is clearly Paula Deen.
Anthony Bourdain
#39. I've seen zero evidence of any nation on Earth other than Mexico even remotely having the slightest clue what Mexican food is about or even come close to reproducing it. It is perhaps the most misunderstood country and cuisine on Earth.
Anthony Bourdain
#40. Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you've got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it's a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.
Anthony Bourdain
#41. I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.
Anthony Bourdain
#42. What is love? Love is eating twenty-four ounces of raw fish at four o'clock in the morning.
Anthony Bourdain
#44. One of my few virtues - I don't have a lot of them - would be a deep sense of curiosity. I'm interested in how other people live in other places; I'm interested in other cultures.
Anthony Bourdain
#46. People everywhere have been very, very good to me, whether I'm with or without cameras.
Anthony Bourdain
#47. Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.
Anthony Bourdain
#48. Those places I don't understand, just doing bad food. It takes some doing. Making good pasta is so much easier than making bad stuff. It actually takes quite an effort to make poor linguine pomodora.
Anthony Bourdain
#49. I'm not impressed by any cooks who can brag about a filet mignon. A guy who can take the neck of a shank or can use tripe to make into something delicious is really interesting to me; that's impressive.
Anthony Bourdain
#50. 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.
Anthony Bourdain
#51. I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner.
Anthony Bourdain
#52. My brain and body and nervous system, they see a plane ride, a long plane trip, as an opportunity to sleep with nothing coming in, nothing to do. I just go offline the minute I'm on the plane.
Anthony Bourdain
#54. I've assembled a pretty good collection of mid-'70s New York punk classics on tape: Dead Boys, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Heartbreakers, Ramones, Television and so on,
Anthony Bourdain
#55. Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me ...
Anthony Bourdain
#57. If you get an opportunity to work with David Simon, anybody with good taste would.
Anthony Bourdain
#58. Remember, brunch is only served once a week - on the weekends. Buzzword here, 'Brunch Menu'. Translation? 'Old, nasty odds and ends, and 12 dollars for two eggs with a free Bloody Mary'.
Anthony Bourdain
#59. I saw how three or four ingredients, as long as they are of the highest and freshest quality, can be combined in a straightforward way to make a truly excellent and occasionally wondrous product.
Anthony Bourdain
#60. They're professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don't forget that the Russians - any Russian - can drink you under the table.
Anthony Bourdain
#61. Lying in bed and smoking my sixth or seventh cigarette of the morning, I'm wondering what the hell I'm going to do today. Oh yeah, I gotta write this thing. But that's not work, really, is it? It feels somehow shifty and ... dishonest, making a buck writing.
Anthony Bourdain
#62. If you've ever hauled a 28-pound two-year-old around New York, you'll find that men fold at the knees a lot quicker than women.
Anthony Bourdain
#63. Naturally, I'm misanthropic. But the Negronis are helping considerably.
Anthony Bourdain
#65. Anyone who's a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: 'Is it good? Does it give pleasure?'
Anthony Bourdain
#66. When I was writing 'Kitchen Confidential,' I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.
Anthony Bourdain
#67. Early moralists who believed that taking too much pleasure at the table led inexorably to bad character-or worse, to sex-were (in the best-case scenario, anyway) absolutely right.
Anthony Bourdain
#68. 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.
Anthony Bourdain
#69. Understand, when you eat meat, that something did die. You have an obligation to value it - not just the sirloin but also all those wonderful tough little bits.
Anthony Bourdain
#70. You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.
Anthony Bourdain
#71. And I had my first oyster. Now, this was a truly significant event. I remember it like I remember losing my virginity - and in many ways, more fondly. August
Anthony Bourdain
#72. 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.
Anthony Bourdain
#73. I'm not Ted Nugent. My house is run, essentially, by an adopted, fully clawed cat with a mean nature. I would never hunt. I would never wear fur. I would never go to a bullfight. I'm not really a meat and potatoes guy.
Anthony Bourdain
#74. 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.
Anthony Bourdain
#75. In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.
Anthony Bourdain
#76. Being a vegan is a first-world phenomenon, completely self-indulgent.
Anthony Bourdain
#77. Where once they used to say, 'Cocaine is God's way of saying you have too much money' - now, maybe EDM is. Come ye lords and princelings of douchedom.
Anthony Bourdain
#78. I'm definitely looking forward to the day when I stop working - if I ever stop working. I like the idea of keeling over in my tomato vines in Sardinia or northern Italy.
Anthony Bourdain
#79. There is no other place on earth even remotely like New Orleans. Don't even try to compare it to anywhere else.
Anthony Bourdain
#80. In my house, neither my wife nor my daughter are impressed that I'm on television, and they remind me of that frequently.
Anthony Bourdain
#81. Since the very beginning, Emeril's had a sense of humor about me calling him names and poking fun at him.
Anthony Bourdain
#82. I am not a fan of people who abuse service staff. In fact, I find it intolerable. It's an unpardonable sin as far as I'm concerned, taking out personal business or some other kind of dissatisfaction on a waiter or busboy.
Anthony Bourdain
#83. 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.
Anthony Bourdain
#84. Nobody in Singapore drinks Singapore Slings. It's one of the first things you find out there. What you do in Singapore is eat. It's a really food-crazy culture, where all of this great food is available in a kind of hawker-stand environment.
Anthony Bourdain
#85. Line cooking done well is a beautiful thing to watch. It's a high-speed collaboration resembling, at its best, ballet or modern dance.
Anthony Bourdain
#86. You know, from age 17 on, my paycheck was coming from cooking and working in kitchens.
Anthony Bourdain
#87. like slicing bread, thick-skinned tomatoes and so on - but on your full line of vegetables, spuds, meat and even fish. My sous-chef uses his for just about everything. F. Dick makes a good one for about twenty-five bucks.
Anthony Bourdain
#88. No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American.
Anthony Bourdain
#89. What is left of the poor? Try to buy a fresh f**king vegetable in West Baltimore. It is a not completely inconceivable scenario in the future, we'll all look like that ... Waddling from convenience store to fast food outlet, chewing mindlessly on 99 cent hamburgers.
Anthony Bourdain
#90. I'd like to play bass like Bootsy Collins. I'm serious. That would be my dream.
Anthony Bourdain
#91. I could do nothing but Brooklyn shows for the rest of my career, and I could die ignorant.
Anthony Bourdain
#92. But it's Atlanta that can lay claim to the best of the best (which is to say worst) chef-friendly dives in America: the legendary Clermont Lounge, a sort of lost-luggage department for strippers, who perform - perfunctorily - on a stage behind the bar.
Anthony Bourdain
#94. Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have.
Anthony Bourdain
#95. I'm a guy who should not have a lot of free time. But when it comes to vacation, I like to pull the plug completely. It's all about my daughter - I'm no longer the star of my own movie.
Anthony Bourdain
#96. Hot, salty, crunchy, and portable, the previously awful-sounding collection of greasy delights can become a Garden of Eden of heart-clogging goodness when you're in a drunken stupor, hungering for fried snacks. At that precise moment, nothing could taste better.
Anthony Bourdain
#98. Having a sous-chef with excellent cooking skills and a criminal mind is one of God's great gifts.
Anthony Bourdain
#99. I was a journeyman chef of middling abilities. Whatever authority I have as a commenter on this world comes from the sheer weight of 28 years in the business. I kicked around for 28 years and came out the other end alive and able to form a sentence.
Anthony Bourdain
#100. Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.
Anthony Bourdain
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