I make friends faster and easier than journalists.
When I'm doing a book tour in the States, I'll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don't know where I am right away. I'll go to the window, and it doesn't help there either, especially if you're in an anonymous strip and it's the usual Victoria's Secret, Gap, Chili's, Applebee's.
Big stuff and little: learning how to order breakfast in a country where I don't speak the language and haven't been before - that's really satisfying to me. I like that.
I didn't want food that looked unapproachable or ridiculously beautiful.
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.
I'm really happy to see Filipino cuisine starting to really take hold outside of the Pinoy community.
The ingredients of a hamburger seldom vary. It's a percentage of fat to lean meat, add salt and prepare and that's it. It shouldn't need a recipe.
I am very much enjoying the fatherhood phase of my life.
At the end of a dinner at my house, my kitchen sink is filled with dishes and there's nothing pretty about the garbage.
I wanted it to look like real cooking in someone's real home or just so out-of-there bizarre that it would be fun.
A good, stinky French cheese or a good Stilton. These are things I really, really love. Dessert I can obviously live without.
The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about - or as a ritual like filling up a car - but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.
My love of soft, runny cheese - it's impossible to resist.
Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors - that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.
I'm not searching for hard news; I'm not a journalist, but I'm interested in pushing to boundaries of where we can do the kind of stories that we want to do. I mean, it's a big world and CNN has made it a lot bigger and they haven't flinched.
If you get an opportunity to work with David Simon, anybody with good taste would.
I'm in no position to try to tell people how to live their family life.
I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.
Italy is hard to beat. It's a family-friendly experience, they like to see kids in restaurants, and at dinner you see all the adults at the table and all the kids at the other end of the table. Maybe they run off and go play.
I do my very best to avoid shark fin.
I'm not Ted Nugent. My house is run, essentially, by an adopted, fully clawed cat with a mean nature. I would never hunt. I would never wear fur. I would never go to a bullfight. I'm not really a meat and potatoes guy.
[George] Orwell's essays. It's got it all. Great writing, a worldview that I find interesting and useful, and most of it timelessly true.
Silly trends don't last long. A lot of this nonsense that pops up, I don't even really pay attention because it'll be gone in a flash.
I don't think people should be encouraged to look like Kate Moss; I think that's unreasonable. I think the normal human body should be glorified. By the same token, if you need a stick to wash yourself, you're not healthy.
I did go into the Amazonian region of Brazil. They have prehistoric river fish that weigh in at around 600 pounds, which you don’t see anywhere else. And foods that cannot be exported or even found in other parts of Brazil.
