Anthony Bourdain Quotes

Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.

Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.

As you move through this life...you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you.

your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.

Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have.

Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime...Please, treat your garlic with respect...Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.

Recognise excellence. Celebrate weirdness and innovation. Oddballs should be cherished, if they can do something other people can't do.

Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.

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

I don't have to agree with you to like you or respect you.

Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.

The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca.

I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.

Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.

Luck is not a business model.

If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.

Good food does lead to sex. As it should. And in a perfect world, good music does too.

Street food, I believe, is the salvation of the human race.

That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund.

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'm excited by any food that's prepared by someone who's proud of what they're doing, who puts a personal imprint on food.

Everything important I learned, I learned as a dishwasher.