I cook. I walk. I go to the movies. I meditate.

To what extent has each one of us contributed to the rise in violence and hatred?

If you take a frozen box and stick it in the microwave, you become connected to the factory. We've forgotten who we are.

The same way one tells a recipe, one tells a family history. Each one of us has our past locked inside.

Tradition is an element that enters into play with destiny, because you are born into a particular family - Jewish or Islamic or Christian or Mexican - and your family determines to some extent what you are expected to become. And society is always there attempting to determine the role we will play within it.

To transform yourself is to transform your destiny.

Food can change anything.

We know that the hardest work is to keep yourself open to the world that technology hasn't tamed.

When I cook certain dishes, I smell my grandmother's kitchen, my grandmother's smells. I thought, 'What a wonderful way to tell a story.'

I wanted to share my doubts and my culinary, amorous, and cosmic experiences. So I wrote 'Like Water for Chocolate,' which is merely the reflection of who I am as a woman, a wife, a mother, a daughter.