Ruth Reichl

“I loved writing fiction. I mean, once I found the character, or the characters, and knew who they were and knew their back-stories, it really - I mean, I went into my studio every day, thinking, 'What's gonna happen to Billy today?'”

“Don't you just love the idea of cooking flowers? I imagine them bursting into bloom, right in the pan.”

“Reading an audio book is a very odd experience because there are three people sitting out there while you're reading in this glass booth, and you can see their reactions.”

“I've been to a couple of restaurants in L.A. that were so loud, I left there with a sore throat; you literally could not have a conversation. I think it's very deliberate: There's this idea that somehow it's more fun if there's a roar in the room.”

“When you're a restaurant critic, you're not home at night, so breakfast became really important for us.”

“By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.”

“That's what I like so much about old libraries - they smell the way we'd like to imagine the past.”

“I was in Berkeley when the food energy in America was in Berkeley. Then it moved to Los Angeles, and I went to Los Angeles. It moved to New York, and I went there.”

“Let's face it: my life tends to revolve around food, and I love feeding people.”

“I couldn't live without butter. Butter is probably my single favourite food.”

“I'm not a big turkey fan, but my husband loves it. Thanksgiving is his favorite meal.”

“A real woman is someone who knows what she wants. If you want to stay home, that's fine, but you have to be clear-eyed.”

“If you really taste a doughnut, it's pretty disgusting. They taste of grease.”

“What I always do in times of trouble or stress is to try and do something I don't know how to do.”

“What does happen in 'Gourmet,' we had eight test kitchens, and at any given time, there were, like, ten or twelve test cooks. And whenever anybody finished something, they would yell, 'Taste!' and everyone would go running towards it, and then taste, and then brutally deconstruct the dish.”

“It was through cooking food and sharing it with each other that our ancestors learned how to become social animals.”

“I think of fiction as the highest calling. I'm kind of addicted to it. It's the thing that has gotten me through all the hard points in my life.”

“I like to work. I believe that work helps us find our self worth.”

“Hunger, I discovered, is very much a matter of the mind, and as I began to study my own appetites, I saw that my teenage craving had not really been for food. That ravenous desire had been a yearning for love, attention, appreciation. Food had merely been my substitute.”

“I think it's part of the DNA of human beings. We are a cooking animal. What differentiates us from all the other animals is that we cook and they don't.”