Cooking is an observation-based process that you can't do if you're so completely focused on a recipe.

I love to have battles of the wits with people that can dish fast and dirty - and it leads to problems occasionally, 'cause I can sound mean without attempting to be mean.

Culinary tradition is not always based on fact. Sometimes it's based on history, on habits that come out of a time when kitchens were fueled by charcoal.

Slicing a warm slab of bacon is a lot like giving a ferret a shave. No matter how careful you are, somebody's going to get hurt.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.

My college degree was in theater. But the real reason, if I have any success in that milieu, so to speak, is because I spent a lot of years directing, I spent a lot of years behind the camera

Laughing brains are more absorbent.

So on one hand, honey is an amazingly sophisticated and efficient food source. On the other hand, it's bee backwash.

I had kicked around the idea for Good Eats when I was directing commercials.

A lot of food shows need only to tempt. Some food shows only need to inspire, to empower. And there are a lot of shows that do that.

A home cook who relies too much on a recipe is sort of like a pilot who reads the plane's instruction manual while flying.

It's only artists who know how to use their eyes

Health care probably contributes a lot more to the common wealth than finance.

Whatever your problems in math are, I assure mine are greater.

You get into habits. Ways of being with certain people.

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment.

I don't think you can ever completely transform yourself on film, but if you do your job well, you can make people believe that you're the character you're trying to be.

So you want to be married, oh baby, trying to put me on a chain, ain't that some shame? You must be losing your weak little mind.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

How wretched is the person who hangs on by the favors of the powerful.

Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.