I would challenge any American cook, regardless of what they've learned from their mom, to operate a restaurant and not have spent any real time in Italy.

We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day.

There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria.

If you want your kids to listen to you, don't yell at them. Whisper. Make them lean in. My kids taught me that. And I do it with adults now.

I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.

When I was a child, our whole family cooked. All my cousins cooked. All my aunts and uncles cooked. It was part of our heritage.

The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it.

I got some media coverage for using the tail, the ear, the oink.

Close your eyes and place your finger on a map. Wherever it lands, that's the theme of the evening. So many times we settle for routine dishes. This forces you to try new cuisines.

Chefs don't actually say 'That's a spicy meat-a-ball,' except to indicate that there's a bomb threat in the restaurant without alarming the customers. Terrorism is the spiciest meatball there is.

The kitchen really is the castle itself. This is where we spend our happiest moments and where we find the joy of being a family.

We have to be willing to acknowledge the good, or all we bring is bitterness to the bad, and that doesn’t help make things any better.

Always take an inventory of your life

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.

I think going from laughing to crying to laughing to crying - making those quick turns adds years to your life.

I felt that everything is beautiful, but that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists.

We sold a certain, steady amount of product for them and they could count on it. When it came time to ask for the money for this new record, they dropped us. It was fine with us. It was a dead fish.

I just hope that some of the movies I'm in are still welcome years from now.

Boris [Johnson] and Dave [Cameron] gnawed each other's testicles [during the Tory civil war which blighted the EU referendum].

The best result of mathematics is to be able to do without it.

Some people stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.