We had been talking for nearly a year. It was very, very closely held, cNN did not know, the camera people did not know. Only a very tight group at [ production company ] Zero Point Zero, my partners, me and very few people at the White House. It was very closely held. At the dinner, Bourdain praised Obama for being.

Anthony Bourdain

Categorized in : Entertainment

I'm away 250 days a year. It's a tough situation.

Anthony Bourdain

tough-situations tough years

The cookbooks I value the most in my collection are the ones where you hear the author's voice and point-of-view in every recipe.

Anthony Bourdain

voice recipes views

I go anywhere I want, do whatever I want when I get there, they let me make self-indulgent TV about that experience, and give me about as much creative freedom as anyone's ever had in the history of television.

Anthony Bourdain

creative self giving

I am very much enjoying the fatherhood phase of my life.

Anthony Bourdain

phases enjoy fatherhood

When I'm back in New York - and this is a terrible thing to complain about - I eat a lot more really, really good food than perhaps I'd like to. So many of my friends are really good chefs. It's kind of like being in the Mafia.

Anthony Bourdain

mafia new-york complaining

I think it's important if you're going to write a cookbook, it should sound like you talking - it should be things you actually believe, otherwise I'm not interested.

Anthony Bourdain

writing believe thinking

If somebody crafts an interesting tweet that’ll lead me to their blog, I’m going to their blog.

Anthony Bourdain

tweet crafts interesting

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn't actually doing any writing.

Anthony Bourdain

college writing thinking

The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about - or as a ritual like filling up a car - but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.

Anthony Bourdain

filling-up naps sex

I hated the Naked Chef. Fine, yes, he did good things for school food or whatever, but, you know, I don't want my chefs to be cute and adorable.

Anthony Bourdain

adorable cute school

In Italy, kids are taken to restaurants very early, they're welcome there, and they learn how to behave. You don't see a lot of screaming crying kids acting out in a restaurant in Italy. They don't put up with that.

Anthony Bourdain

acting taken kids

I'd never done anything useful as far as my writing.

Anthony Bourdain

done writing

I'd like to make a show with Keith Richards.

Anthony Bourdain

keith shows

The world they live in now is in no way the world the Michelin system was set up to evaluate back in France, which was all about motorists and seeing if it was worth driving an extra 50 miles for a restaurant. It's a silly thing. Why do you want to help a tire company? You don't owe them nothing.

Anthony Bourdain

want silly world

If people are eating mostly pickles after many generations, where did that come from? It's reflective of history, often a painful history. It's central to a culture, to a history, to a personal story. It's communication at its most fundamental.

Anthony Bourdain

generations communication people

If people are working only rice and beans for much of their diet, it says something.

Anthony Bourdain

beans rice people

I'm of a generation that romanticizes and maybe even over-romanticized things that were painful, that hurt others. I feel that. But I don't know if I have any regrets.

Anthony Bourdain

generations regret hurt

[George] Orwell's essays. It's got it all. Great writing, a worldview that I find interesting and useful, and most of it timelessly true.

Anthony Bourdain

worldview writing interesting

There's something not normal about you if you're writing a book about yourself, or about anything. And if you're the kind of person who can deal with being recognized by strangers and if that's tolerable or pleasing to you, and not immediately terrifying, that's not normal either.

Anthony Bourdain

normal writing book

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.

Anthony Bourdain

artist character thinking