Frankie Avalon

“I'm not a chef: I'm a cook.”

“Everybody wants instant gratification for everything. It's all got to be like fast food. You want a hamburger now, you get it now. Hey, even when McDonald's started out, it took them a couple of minutes to make your burger and get it to you. Now, it's all wham, bam. That's tough enough on a burger. It's impossible with a relationship.”

“I definitely remember doing 'The Alamo' with John Wayne and Lawrence Harvey and Linda Cristal. We'd work six days a week, and then John Wayne would invite us down to a little place in Texas called Del Rio, and we would break bread and have some wine and tell stories.”

“When I started to play trumpet I was fortunate to learn very quickly.”

“No sooner than I did take it seriously, I had million-selling hits and movies with John Wayne.”

“If I go to a restaurant, or if I'm at an airport and people recognize me, it amazes me that most of them know me from 'Grease.'”

“Well, we all age, but I'd been taking herbal supplements for a long time.”

“There have been a lot of memorable meals in my life and in my career.”

“They look for the top note to end every song. They don't know what they are singing about. There is no style.”

“'Grease' is the most successful thing I've ever been part of. It spans generations.”

“If you watch 'American Idol,' and you close your eyes, you don't know who's singing because they all sound exactly alike.”

“I still have the tradition of Sunday dinners at my house, and I make all kinds of different Italian foods, and there's a lot of fun going on.”

“They weren't great pictures, but they were fun, and they really represented that period of time well.”

“These kids today, everything is about hitting a vocal home run.”

“Yes, but I don't think of the Teen Angel as of an age.”

“For me, the biggest successes I've ever had were the ones I never counted on. I never thought my first big record would be a hit. I thought it was an average song.”

“My mother never threw anything out. If there was a sliver of a tomato, it was in the refridge. I would come in with my friends, and Mom would say, 'Want something to eat?' In 20 minutes, there was four, five dishes to eat.”

“The fun of cooking is the fun of communicating with people, even if it's just two people. As you're cooking, you're talking, you're having a glass of wine. It's wonderful; it's an experience. Once you get into cooking, it becomes something that you really look forward to doing.”

“I love Billy Joel's music, but let's put it this way - I think this is a frustrated, ugly man.”

“I think about growing up back in Philly. It was about friendship with the guys and having a distant crush on some gal. And when you finally got the nerve to take her out on a date, you went to her parents' house with a shine on your shoes, took her to the movies, and got her home nice and early.”