Anthony Bourdain Quotes

Naturally, I'm misanthropic. But the Negronis are helping considerably.

There is no Final Resting Place of the Mind.

I urge you to travel - as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to.

The fact of the matter is that, for years, the restaurant and service industry has been, to a great extent, built on the backs of often underpaid immigrants of often dubious legal status.

There's always this assumption that you're going to get everything right immediately. And any professional understands that that's just not so.

Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.

Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.

Food is so personal - I mean someone is talking to you when people are cooking for you. I like to hear an identifiable voice.

As a chef I’m not your dietitian or your ethicist, I’m in the pleasure business.

I always entertain the notion that I'm wrong, or that I'll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.

When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you've been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you've got Type 2 Diabetes... It's in bad taste if nothing else.

Get up early and go to the local produce markets. In Latin America and Asia, those are usually great places to find delicious food stalls serving cheap, authentic and fresh specialties.

As Americans, we tend to look at Mexican food as nachos, which is not Mexican food really - they don't eat them.

Everything important I learned, I learned as a dishwasher.

Free time is my enemy. I recognized early on I'm not a guy who should have a lot of time to contemplate the mysteries of the universe. I need to stay busy... That's just the nature of my demons.

My house is run, essentially, by an adopted, fully clawed cat with a mean nature.

Southeast Asia has a real grip on me. From the very first time I went there, it was a fulfillment of my childhood fantasies of the way travel should be.

I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas - fat, drugged, and completely out of it.

In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful.

If you've ever hauled a 28-pound two-year-old around New York, you'll find that men fold at the knees a lot quicker than women.

I think fine dining is dying out everywhere... but I think there will be - and there has to always be - room for at least a small number of really fine, old-school fine-dining restaurants.

I didn't want food that looked unapproachable or ridiculously beautiful.

My French definitely improves the more I drink, as I worry less and less about absolutely perfect grammar. I do speak and understand the language, just not particularly well.

Cream rises. Excellence does have its rewards.

Where once they used to say, 'Cocaine is God's way of saying you have too much money' - now, maybe EDM is. Come ye lords and princelings of douchedom.

I, a product of the New Frontier and Great Society, honestly believed that the world pretty much owed me a living--all I had to do was wait around in order to live better than my parents.

If I were trapped in one city and had to eat one nation's cuisine for the rest of my life, I would not mind eating Japanese. I adore Japanese food. I love it.

I'm really good at sleeping on planes. I mean, I smell jet fuel and I'm out; I'm asleep for takeoff.

Really annoys me any time I see Asian fusion too. Asia is a big place; which Asian are you talking about? You notice it's never Uzbek or Tajik food. It's Thai, and it's generally insulting.

Venezuela is another place I'd like very much to go, which is proving very difficult. I have not been there to make a show and I'd like to, very much.

Look, getting bullied in school and coming home crying in the rain and my mom making me a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup with some oysterettes. It was comfort food; that is what food should be.

Regret is something you’ve got to just live with, you can’t drink it away. You can’t run away from it. You can’t trick yourself out of it. You’ve just got to own it.

I admire people who do things that are interesting to them, who don't have a strategy or a master plan or have a brand - I don't care about any of those things.

I’m a Twitter addict. Jose Andres is a serial tweeter. It’s funny to see which chefs have embraced it, and the different paths they take.

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

I would frankly be shocked if Donald Trump even knows how to use chopsticks or is even able to manipulate them with those tiny little fingers.

I'm certainly dismayed by what I'm seeing now. There's a lot of ugliness of a kind I've never seen in my lifetime, or heard in my lifetime. But, look, I'm a romantic. I'm hopeful.

I'm definitely looking forward to the day when I stop working - if I ever stop working. I like the idea of keeling over in my tomato vines in Sardinia or northern Italy.

I'm not going anywhere. I hope. It's been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Turning your nose up at a genuine and sincere gesture of hospitality is no way to travel or to make friends around the world.

I feel that if Jacques Pepin shows you how to make an omelet, the matter is pretty much settled. That's God talking.

If you have a good experience in a restaurant, you tell 2 people. If you have a bad experience, you tell 10 people.

When dealing with complex transportation issues, the best thing to do is pull up with a cold beer and let somebody else figure it out.

Unlicensed hooch from a stranger in a parking lot. Good idea? Yes, of course it is.

One of my few virtues - I don't have a lot of them - would be a deep sense of curiosity. I'm interested in how other people live in other places; I'm interested in other cultures.

I'd love to play bass with Parliament Funkadelic, but I can't play bass, so I don't think that's going to happen.

People's choice to become vegan, from people I've spoken to, seems motivated by fear.

I would like to see people more aware of where their food comes from. I would like to see small farmers empowered. I feed my daughter almost exclusively organic food.

Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you've got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it's a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.

I'm a comic nerd. I'm a former serious collector for much of my childhood and early teen years I wanted to draw underground comics.