Julia Child Quotes & Sayings

#1. I love root vegetables: carrots, parsnips, and turnips.

#2. But I was a pure romantic, and only operating with half my burners turned on.

#3. Many of the delicious soups you eat in French homes and little restaurants are made just this way, with a leek-and-potato base to which leftover vegetables or sauces and a few fresh items are added.

Julia Child

#4. I was a romantic, messy thinker. I was raised with very conservative beliefs, but that was a long time ago.

Julia Child

#5. Pro-choice is the only way to be
because women are human beings, after all, and should be treated as such.

Julia Child

#6. I'm very much for making everything safe. The more natural the means we use to raise our vegetables and get rid of bugs, the better.

Julia Child

#7. Wine is a living liquid containing no preservatives. Its life cycle comprises youth, maturity, old age, and death. When not treated with reasonable respect it will sicken and die.

Julia Child

#8. In the 1960s, you could eat anything you wanted, and of course, people were smoking cigarettes and all kinds of things, and there was no talk about fat and anything like that, and butter and cream were rife. Those were lovely days for gastronomy, I must say.

Julia Child

#9. Any disaster is a learning process.

Julia Child

#10. Romance is the icing but love is the cake.

Julia Child

#11. Cooking hasn't yet been accepted as the art form it is. It should be on the level with any of the other art forms.

Julia Child

#12. Usually, one's cooking is better than one thinks it is.

Julia Child

#13. No one's more important than people.

Julia Child

#14. My mother was independent. She had grown up in Dalton and Pittsfield, in western Massachusetts, and she was one of the first women drivers in that area.

Julia Child

#15. The more you know, the more you can create. There's no end to imagination in the kitchen.

Julia Child

#16. I would far prefer to have things happen as they naturally do, such as the mousse refusing to leave the mold, the potatoes sticking to the skillet, the apple charlotte slowly collapsing. One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and bear with it if you cannot.

Julia Child

#17. I discovered that when one follows the artist's eye one sees unexpected treasures in so many seemingly ordinary scenes.

Julia Child

#18. Good french cooking cannot be produced by a zombie cook.

Julia Child

#19. People who love to eat are always the best people.

Julia Child

#20. If you're buying tomatoes pick them up and smell them-they should have a lovely perfume. They need to be kept at fifty degrees or above, particularly during the growing season, because that's when they develop their flavor.

Julia Child

#21. Animals that we eat are raised for food in the most economical way possible, and the serious food producers do it in the most humane way possible. I think anyone who is a carnivore needs to understand that meat does not originally come in these neat little packages.

Julia Child

#22. Well, all I know is this - nothing you ever learn is really wasted, and will sometime be used.

Julia Child

#23. It's simply a very romantic place. Just one look at any of those streets, and you couldn't be anywhere else - it's so beautiful, and there's that location, and the sense of the free spirit. Who couldn't become ravenous in such a place?

Julia Child

#24. If you're in a good profession, it's hard to get bored, because you're never finished - there will always be work you haven't done.

Julia Child

#25. The sweetness and generosity and politeness and gentleness and humanity of the French had shown me how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly.

Julia Child

#26. I'm not a chef. I think in this country, we use the term very loosely. I'm a cook and a teacher.

Julia Child

#27. Tears mess up your makeup.

Julia Child

#28. MODERATION.SMALL HELPINGS. SAMPLE A LITTLE BIT OF EVERYTHING. THESE ARE THE SECRETS OF HAPPINESS AND GOOD HEALTH.

Julia Child

#29. I found that the recipes in most - in all - the books I had were really not adequate. They didn't tell you enough ... I won't do anything unless I'm told why I'm doing it. So I felt that we needed fuller explanations so that if you followed one of those recipes, it should turn out exactly right.

Julia Child

#30. As you get older, you shouldn't waste time drinking bad wine.

Julia Child

#31. I believe in red meat. I often said: red meat and gin.

Julia Child

#32. Dining with one's friends and beloved family is certainly one of life's primal and most innocent delights, one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal.

Julia Child

#33. My father was in real estate, banking, and land management. As family life, it was very conventional, happy, and comfortable. We weren't wealthy, but we were well-off.

Julia Child

#34. But how nice it is that one can come to know someone just through correspondence, and become really passionate friends.

Julia Child

#35. The egg can be your best friend if you just give it the right break

Julia Child

#36. I was in pure, flavorful heaven at the Cordon Bleu.

Julia Child

#37. You are the butter to my bread,and the breath to my life

Julia Child

#38. You don't spring into good cooking naked. You have to have some training. You have to learn how to eat.

Julia Child

#39. The secret of a happy marriage is finding the right person. You know they're right if you love to be with them all the time.

Julia Child

#40. I would happily die with a bottle of white Burgundy in my mouth,

Julia Child

#41. Forget the cheap white wine: go to beef and gin!

Julia Child

#42. The perfect dressing is essential to the perfect salad, and I see no reason whatsoever for using a bottled dressing, which may have been sitting on the grocery shelf for weeks, even months - even years.

Julia Child

#43. You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made,' [Chef Bugnard] said. 'Even after you eat it, it stays with you - always.

Julia Child

#44. I was lucky to marry Paul. He was a great inspiration, his enthusiasm about wine and food helped to shape my tastes, and his encouragement saw me through discouraging moments. I never would have had my career without Paul Child.

Julia Child

#45. Food, like the people who eat it, can be stimulated by wine or spirits. And, as with people, it can also be spoiled.

Julia Child

#46. You must have discipline to have fun.

Julia Child

#47. Always remember: If you're alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who's going to know?

Julia Child

#48. A cookbook is only as good as its poorest recipe.

Julia Child

#49. When you have a few cake formulas and filling ideas in your repertoire, you will find that it's pretty much an assembly job - you can mix and match a different way every time.

Julia Child

#50. You have to do it and do it, until you get it right.

Julia Child

#51. People who are not interested in food always seem rather dry and unloving and don't have a real gusto for life.

Julia Child

#52. There are reasons, and then there are excuses.

Julia Child

#53. If you're not ready to fail, you're not going to learn how to cook.

Julia Child

#54. It was fun, although we felt like pawns, or prawns, in the maelstrom.

Julia Child

#55. The main thing is to have a gutsy approach and use your head.

Julia Child

#56. If you're afraid of butter, use cream.

Julia Child

#57. I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.

Julia Child

#58. Cassoulet, that best of bean feasts, is everyday fare for a peasant but ambrosia for a gastronome, though its ideal consumer is a 300-pound blocking back who has been splitting firewood nonstop for the last twelve hours on a subzero day in Manitoba.

Julia Child

#59. Freshness is essential. That makes all the difference.

Julia Child

#60. Cooking was taken with such seriousness in France that even ordinary chefs were proud of their profession. That's what appealed to me.

Julia Child

#61. It's hard to imagine a civilization without onions; in one form or another their flavor blends into almost everything in the meal except the desert.

Julia Child

#62. I always try to buy just what I need. You get ideas as to what's in season and what's best. I think if you have a preconceived idea before shopping, that makes it difficult. You have to have an open mind.

Julia Child

#63. Fine # wine is a living liquid ... Its life comprises youth, maturity, old age, and death.

Julia Child

#64. Always start out with a larger pot than what you think you need.

Julia Child

#65. Cooking well doesn't mean cooking fancy.

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#66. Eating is the secret to good cooking.

Julia Child

#67. In the 1970s we got nouvelle cuisine, in which a lot of the old rules were kicked over. And then we had cuisine minceur, which people mixed up with nouvelle cuisine but was actually fancy diet cooking.

Julia Child

#68. Noodles are not only amusing but delicious ...

Julia Child

#69. Of course I made many boo-boos. At first this broke my heart, but then I came to understand that learning how to fix one's mistakes, or live with them, was an important part of becoming a cook.

Julia Child

#70. I had come to the conclusion that I must really be French, only no one had ever informed me of this fact. I loved the people, the food, the lay of the land, the civilized atmosphere, and the generous pace of life.

Julia Child

#71. I think careful cooking is love, don't you? The loveliest thing you can cook for someone who's close to you is about as nice a valentine as you can give.

Julia Child

#72. The more I learned the more I realized how very much one has to know before one is in-the-know at all.

Julia Child

#73. In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.

Julia Child

#74. You'll never know everything about anything, especially something you love.

Julia Child

#75. It's so beautifully arranged on the plate - you know someone's fingers have been all over it.

Julia Child

#76. It is the Americans who have managed to crown minced beef as hamburger, and to send it round the world so that even the fussy French have taken to le boeuf hache, le hambourgaire.

Julia Child

#77. Sooner or later the public will forget you; the memory of you will fade. What's important are the individuals you've influenced along the way.

Julia Child

#78. You learn to cook so that you don't have to be a slave to recipes. You get what's in season and you know what to do with it.

Julia Child

#79. Just speak very loudly and quickly, and state your position with utter conviction, as the French do, and you'll have a marvelous time!

Julia Child

#80. We hit it off immediately, especially Helene, who was a 'swallow-life-in-big-gulps' kind of person.

Julia Child

#81. Celebrity has its uses. I can always get a seat in any restaurant.
Source: Esquire Magazine, June 2000 original edition

Julia Child

#82. Drama is very important in life: You have to come on with a bang. You never want to go out with a whimper. Everything can have drama if it's done right. Even a pancake.

Julia Child

#83. I have trouble with toast. Toast is very difficult. You have to watch it all the time or it burns up.

Julia Child

#84. In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal.

Julia Child

#85. I think the inner person is the most important ... I would like to see an invention that keeps the mind alert. That's what is important.

Julia Child

#86. If it weren't for Julia Child, I might never have moved past brown rice and tofu. Worse, I might still be afraid of being less than perfect.

Julia Child

#87. I still feel that French cooking is the most important in the world, one of the few that has rules. If you follow the rules, you can do pretty well.

Julia Child

#88. I think every woman should have a blowtorch.

Julia Child

#89. I was never a spy. I was with the OSS organization. We had a number of women, but we were all office help.

Julia Child

#90. We ought to enjoy our food, we ought to take time and care and prepare it correctly, and we ought to have fun doing it and make it a communal event.

Julia Child

#91. In France, Paul explained, good cooking was regarded as a combination of national sport and high art, and wine was always served with lunch and dinner. "The trick is moderation," he said.

Julia Child

#92. We had a happy marriage because we were together all the time. We were friends as well as husband and wife. We just had a good time.

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#93. I don't use the word gourmet. The word doesn't mean anything anymore. 'Gourmet' makes it sound like someone is putting sherry wine in the corn-flake casserole.

Julia Child

#94. The art of bread making can become a consuming hobby, and no matter how often and how many kinds of bread one has made, there always seems to be something new to learn.

Julia Child