59 Quotes by Bill Buford

People have all this interest in food. But for most people, it's a mystery how to prepare food. I wanted the knowledge cooks know: the in-your-fingers knowledge you get by doing it over and over.

Since 1890, the Tour d'Argent's basic recipe hasn't changed. If you find yourself at the restaurant tomorrow, you will eat duck in the confidence that it was what someone ate a hundred years ago. You will eat it in the expectation that someone else will be served it a hundred years from now.

The commonplace about Italian cooking is that it's very simple; in practice, the simplicity needs to be learned, and the best way to learn it is to go to Italy and see it firsthand.

The first glimpse I had of what Mario Batali's friends had described to me as the 'myth of Mario' was on a cold Saturday night in January 2002, when I invited him to a birthday dinner.

The first sign that I'd been unknowingly affected by cooking shows occurred on a Sunday morning when I realized I was talking to myself. I'd been making toast. 'First, we cut our bread,' I whispered. 'Do you know why?' I stopped what I was doing and looked up. 'Let me tell you why.'

The Rio de Contas, a wide, almost delta-like river, was startling, a sudden big sky and a feeling of openness, and very bright. It was noisy with birds. The rain forest houses most of the earth's plant and animal population. I hadn't anticipated it would be so loud.

Writers witnessing actors read their stories will often come away very confused because they'll have had this idea of their story in their head, which is a story that they read over and over again, then an actor will do completely different things that they didn't know were there,

When I was at Babbo, I was covered in scars and scabs and burned bits - melted hair, ribbed burns I got reaching across the top of a hot skillet... I sliced off the tip of my finger. I cleaved my forehead - a deep, ugly wound. Luckily, it regenerated.

Her travel writing was characterized by a high moral purpose and an overwhelming sense of justice. What distinguishes her journalism is her eloquent outrage and commitment to fair play.