Kate Christensen

“I started reading G. K. Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday' on a subway ride, almost missed my stop, and walked home thumbing pages.”

“I think there's a part of my brain where food, language, and memory all intersect, and it's really powerful. I think I'm not alone in this.”

“There are two kinds of ham: raw and cooked. Raw ham is cured with salt and/or smoke over time; cooked ham is boiled. Every culture that makes ham has its own unique and various methods.”

“I never see myself as writing satire. I think I write about people as they really are, without making them better or worse.”

“I procrastinate all morning. That's when I get my office work done and answer e-mails and see what's on the Internet and do laundry.”

“I wrote my first story when I was six or seven.”

“David Levi is a teacher as well as a chef, and, like most teachers, he loves to talk.”

“In a family of all girls, I was always the 'boy' in my mind - the protector, the masculine one. No one would ever have to worry about me.”

“In 1990, when I had just arrived in New York City as a wet-behind-the-ears 20-something girl from Arizona, I spent a year or more working as the personal secretary and secret ghostwriter to an American-born countess in her apartment on the Upper East Side.”

“Food is not a means toward resolution. It can't cure heartbreak or solve untenable dilemmas.”

“My father's grandparents came from Norway and settled in the Scandinavian bastion of Minnesota. As a little girl in Tempe, Arizona, I daydreamed about picking cloudberries by a fjord in a fresh Nordic wind.”

“I don't feel that I've had a life of abuse or that I am a victim in any way. My life is pretty typical of a lot of Americans of my generation who grew up in the sixties in families like mine that were sort of unconventional.”

“I grew up in an all-female family - two sisters and a mostly single mother - and we often bonded, in part, by disparaging men and feeling superior to them.”

“My 50th birthday approaching felt like a big milestone to me. I've lived half a century. If I write about food and use my life as a fulcrum to move the story along, maybe I've lived long enough to fashion a narrative that has a happy ending.”

“Iggy Pop is God, if God looked half that good with his shirt off.”

“Ham is undoubtedly one of the most universally beloved of meats, at least in those parts of the world where it's not prohibited.”

“Broccoli gets such a bad rap. This is perplexing to those of us who love that green, treelike, stalky vegetable.”

“I love the perspective afforded by having lived five decades, a degree of bemused and muted calm, a relief from the insistent demands of a turbulent ego and rampant ambition. I'd love to stay here forever. But something tells me that 50 is a sunny idyll, a temporary state of grace, a golden afternoon.”

“Chan Marshall has one of the most haunting, wrenching voices of any current singer, male or female.”

“It makes you vulnerable to win an award. It's nice to get the attention, but your neck is stuck out.”