Top 100 Dufresne's Quotes
#1. The first chess book that I read was Dufresne's self-tutor, published with Lasker's Common Sense in Chess as an appendix.
Vasily Smyslov
#2. Whites cook at a lower temperature, set at a lower temperature than yolks. That, to me, is very interesting. That has opened up - as an egg lover, that has opened up sort of a world of possibilities, of applications.
Wylie Dufresne
#3. Inez and I had been in the same book club for a while. She once told me that literary theory was reading without imagination, and I've loved her ever since.
John Dufresne
#4. I have strong feelings about cookbooks because I am a lover of them and student of them and devourer of them and collect them. I find them to be a great source of inspiration. When I was a cook and not making much money, I always used to spend most of what I had on cookbooks.
Wylie Dufresne
#5. Reading is also a creative activity if you're doing it right. You can learn more from a story that's left the tracks than from a successful story.
John Dufresne
#6. My mother made the best scrambled eggs, super-loose and soft.
Wylie Dufresne
#8. I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.
John Dufresne
#9. With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.
John Dufresne
#10. I think things like 'farm to table' are misleading. I think sometimes that becomes a pedestal or a soap box to get people into your restaurant but is not ... it's almost empty in a way. I mean, my food comes from a farm, and I serve it on a table.
Wylie Dufresne
#11. Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It's unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting.
John Dufresne
#12. Every dish doesn't have to be showy, and every dish doesn't have to slap you in the face with technique.
Wylie Dufresne
#13. The spirit of pickling is one of adventure and fun.
Wylie Dufresne
#14. I would say that molecular gastronomy is a field of science. I would - I would say that it's probably lumped under chemistry, maybe. Because cooking, while it has certainly biology and some physics, it's mostly chemistry.
Wylie Dufresne
#16. Extremely ripe things are not ideal for pickling. If you pour a hot liquid over super ripe strawberries, you're going to have strawberry soup.
Wylie Dufresne
#17. It's been a struggle to get people to come eat for fun. You know, the way they listen to music. You can do all kinds of things with music. But food - it's something people need, and that changes everything. You start playing with it, people have all sorts of reactions.
Wylie Dufresne
#18. Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
John Dufresne
#19. Not having a New York culinary tradition, far from being limiting, it's an opportunity to create freely.
Wylie Dufresne
#20. Hollandaise, I would like to pour over my head and just rub all over myself. Eggs Benedict is genius. It's eggs covered in eggs.
Wylie Dufresne
#21. Whatever loss, pain or tragedy you have experienced, you can get through.
Aimee DuFresne
#22. As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
John Dufresne
#23. I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
John Dufresne
#24. Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
John Dufresne
#25. Whether it be cereal technology or candy technology or snack technology, puff snacks, I'm always curious to know how those things are made and how we can take that technology, those ingredients, and apply it to a stand-alone restaurant.
Wylie Dufresne
#26. I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
John Dufresne
#27. Eggs are one of my all-time favorite foods, and making the over-easy egg is a test of skill.
Wylie Dufresne
#28. You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.
John Dufresne
#29. As a pure source of reference, 'Modernist Cuisine' is incredibly helpful. It's like a modern-day encyclopedia, except for a single subject. It's not always the answer, but it's always a starting point. I feel honored to have been able to contribute to it.
Wylie Dufresne
#30. There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.
John Dufresne
#31. I like all cheese, but my guiltiest pleasure is definitely American cheese.
Wylie Dufresne
#32. Neighborhoods change. In some ways, it's part of the beauty of New York City. It's in a constant state of flux.
Wylie Dufresne
#33. Fish butchering means a lot to me as a chef; I take pride in it and get a lot of joy from filleting fish, working with fish, breaking down fish, trying to understand fish.
Wylie Dufresne
#34. I lost my job and started painting houses with a friend. The marriage had ended about the same time the career did.
John Dufresne
#35. It's easier to write about a place sometimes when you've left it, when you can apply your imagination to your memory and let your emotions guide the writing about a place.
John Dufresne
#36. I think I've learned to be mindful. I may not have taken the time to try to understand narrative techniques, let's say, with any rigor, if I did not also have to try to explain those techniques to someone else.
John Dufresne
#37. Green vegetables are something that fascinate chefs; the ability to keep vegetables green. How do we keep them green? What makes them green? Why are they green? And then that sort of army green. Why do they go from bright vibrant electric green to army green, and how can we avoid that?
Wylie Dufresne
#38. People have been manipulating food ever since they realized cooking a whole animal was difficult. Cows don't come in hot dog form.
Wylie Dufresne
#39. A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
John Dufresne
#40. I've always had fond memories of cooking Thanksgiving.
Wylie Dufresne
#41. The facts, however, are unimportant in fiction. It's not the events of my life that I mine, but the emotional experiences I've had.
John Dufresne
#42. I don't think of eggs as being fundamental to the flavor of mayonnaise, but they are to Hollandaise.
Wylie Dufresne
#43. I learned to love stories by listening to them.
John Dufresne
#44. When ramps are in season, we pickle a bunch of ramps and fold that into soup. Pickled pearl onions are great chopped up or pureed.
Wylie Dufresne
#45. What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.
John Dufresne
#46. The landscape of childhood shapes us as it shapes the characters in our stories. You never forget the sacred places of your childhood.
John Dufresne
#47. The universe may be tenderly indifferent to our fate, but we shouldn't be. We are our brothers' keepers. There is right, and there is wrong. There are consequences to our actions or inactions. Disregard can be an act of violence.
John Dufresne
#48. I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable.
John Dufresne
#49. It turns out that life in the kitchen is very similar to life on a team. Sports and kitchens are about teams. I found my alternate team sport in the kitchen.
Wylie Dufresne
#50. Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
John Dufresne
#51. It was then that I had a choice. I could cry and lay down and die, or I could use what I had learned from him to keep going and fully live.
Aimee DuFresne
#52. You can always tell a happy marriage. People in love begin to acquire each other's traits, each other's styles- they begin to look and act alike. They want to please. They admire each other and, naturally enough, want to become what they esteem and cherish.
John Dufresne
#53. A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
John Dufresne
#54. I have no interest in vegetarians whatsoever. Zero. Less than zero.
Wylie Dufresne
#55. It's just about asking why. We as cooks historically have been very, very technically proficient but not technically informed as to why we do what we do. Modernist cuisine is about that knowledge.
Wylie Dufresne
#56. At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
John Dufresne
#57. The most important thing with turkey is to let it rest - most people don't let it rest long enough. It will get juicier the longer you let it rest.
Wylie Dufresne
#58. Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose.
John Dufresne
#59. Dufresne, his name was - I remember, because it sounds a little like mine. It seems he was not so smart at wife-killing as he was at picking growth stocks.
Stephen King
#60. Okay, a lot of people think that I'm someone known for a love of eggs and egg cookery. Being asked to endorse an egg yolk separator, I mean, I understood where it came from, but it didn't seem necessarily like something that was ultimately worth pursuing.
Wylie Dufresne
#62. I've been asked to endorse lots of different pieces of equipment. It's not necessarily that it's an awful thing to be asked to endorse something, because it's inherently a compliment to your skills, your abilities, on a level. But sometimes it's just not the right fit.
Wylie Dufresne
#63. The East Village is where I cut my teeth as a kid. I ran around here on a skateboard.
Wylie Dufresne
#64. She knows what it's like to love someone who cannot love you back. Someone who needs you, holds you, yes, but someone who will never know that love is the knife in your heart.
John Dufresne
#65. I write with a fountain pen. And then revise word by word and line by line so that the first draft of a scene is usually the tenth or so draft.
John Dufresne
#66. There's nobody you can call and say, 'So, can you maybe send me your formula for frying Hollandaise?' because to the best of my knowledge, it didn't exist before we did it.
Wylie Dufresne
#67. Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
John Dufresne
#68. I can fry hollandaise, I can fry ketchup, I can fry mustard.
Wylie Dufresne
#69. Novels are written, not wished into existence. You have to sit your ass in the chair or nothing gets done.
John Dufresne
#70. If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
John Dufresne
#71. I am in a sorry state, for I do not even know what I do not know. - St. Augustine
John Dufresne
#72. I should be scared, but I am far too excited to let in any fear.
Aimee DuFresne
#73. Judi, a person's worth isn't measured by her utility. We're not tools. We're here to think. To feel. To be good to each other
John Dufresne
#74. I sat around the kitchen every Sunday afternoon listening to my mother and aunts talk about the people in the neighborhood. Gossip - I loved it. And that turns out to be the writer's job: to attend to the gossip and spread it as far as you can.
John Dufresne
#75. Understanding is not about progress; its about process. What we may finally come to understand is that we won't,can't,understand and that incomprehension is essential to our existance. Mystery is our maker.
John Dufresne
#76. Being a chef isn't the ideal career to intersect with parenting, but I try to be in my kids' lives as much as possible.
Wylie Dufresne
#77. Mom always said that confidence is a great leadership tool.
Jerilyn Dufresne
#78. Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.
John Dufresne
#79. We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
John Dufresne
#80. You can't possibly conduct a proper affair without a lot of deliberating, scheming, speculating, and conniving. It's a delicate balance where the excitement must equal the guilt and sex must be as bright as the future you gamble.
John Dufresne
#81. Eggs Benedict is genius. It's eggs covered in eggs. I mean, come on,
that person should be the president.
Wylie Dufresne
#82. I had begun what I thought might be a career in social work. I was married and deeply involved in the anti-war movement. I thought I'd go about saving the world one person at a time. I worked with kids, teenagers mostly, in neighborhood centers, on the streets, and eventually in a drop-in center.
John Dufresne
#83. I was reading for understanding. I wanted to do to a reader what Salinger did for me.
John Dufresne
#84. You make allowances for your family. They may not seem normal to the world but they're normal to you because you've been dealing with them all your life.
John Dufresne
#85. I really don't do much on the night of Thanksgiving other than bring the wine and carve the turkey. My contribution comes the day after, in the form of breakfast. I usually just forage through the leftovers for things that will go well with eggs.
Wylie Dufresne
#86. Drug programs began to turn their attention and money away from prevention and into maintenance. Methadone was cheaper than social workers, I suppose.
John Dufresne
#87. The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
John Dufresne
#88. I think I can poach a pretty mean egg the old-fashioned way.
Wylie Dufresne
#90. There will never be a right or wrong way to cook something, but there will always be a more informed way.
Wylie Dufresne
#91. I've seen cookbooks from lots of great chefs that have been disappointing. A book, to me, it has to have a story. Some of these people, they open a restaurant, and one year later, there's a cookbook. There's not much of a story yet.
Wylie Dufresne
#92. In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It's when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.
John Dufresne
#93. It wasn't the traditional cooking most people do. For me, as a young chef, Thanksgiving meant going to work in the kitchen at places like Gotham, JoJo and Jean-Georges.
Wylie Dufresne
#94. My job has changed over the years, 22 years roughly I've been cooking professionally. When I was younger, I aspired to be the star player. Now, it's more I like to sit in the dugout and make sure the team wins the game.
Wylie Dufresne
#95. The regional tags are often pejorative and dismissive. Don't think of place-bound stories, in other words, but of stories with a strong sense of place.
John Dufresne
#96. Writing a story, you understand, is not done by consensus. But we do learn from each other, and we remind ourselves how important this work we're doing is.
John Dufresne
#97. It wasn't that I wanted to know her now. I wanted to have already known her. I wanted her fears and her desires to have shaped my life. I know this is not love, of course. What it is is a queer feeling of nostalgia for an impossible future, for what can never be. That's fantasy. Love is different.
John Dufresne
#98. It's a funny thing, but it's often overlooked that I'm a huge devout lover of French cooking. I have the utmost respect for them, though they have lost their respect for me because they think the way I cook is nutty.
Wylie Dufresne
#99. There will never be a universal way of cooking, but information will always be universally useful.
Wylie Dufresne
#100. At 9:15 on Thursday morning, June 4, while Jordan Delreese was bludgeoning his two young children to death, I was sitting in Dr. Hamburger's consulting room at the Sunny Isles Geriatric Clinic with my father, who was just then at a loss for words.
John Dufresne
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