I wanted to get away from the Mexican vernacular and do more 'nuevo Latino.' Americans are starting to understand regionality in Mexican food. It is very regional in terms of ingredients.

I like to cook with the philosophy of using great ingredients and not altering them too much.

Latin food suffers like Chinese. You can do marginal Chinese and be successful. You can do crappy Mexican and be packed.

My biggest challenge is cooking traditional French dishes, which usually require very specific techniques and methods. That’s just not my style... I cook from the soul.

Nobody likes sweaty coleslaw.

I was a little, uh, incorrigible as a kid, so the kitchen was a good place to give me structure and balance. It taught me hard work, but then I grew to love it.

My father told me that it is only a mad man that keeps bushy hairs. I asked him, "what about the great men with bushy hairs?". He replied, "education had made them mad, so study to be wise and sane.

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

The mass gross absence of sound in space is more than just silence.

With love, even the rocks will open.

On your best day, you're only as good as I am on my worst with one arm tied behind my back.

Sometimes I don't understand how another can love her, is allowed to love her, since I love her so completely myself, so intensely, so fully, grasp nothing, know nothing, have nothing but her!

I loved him like a fever. Then he left. He kicked through love like it was dust and he kept on walking.

If one does not practice nonviolence in one's own personal relations with others and hopes to use it in bigger affairs, one is vastly mistaken.

It sounds like something from a Woody Guthrie song, but it's true; I was raised in a freight car.

If you try your best, you can always be better.