Top 200 Anthony Bourdain Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart – are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”

— Anthony Bourdain

Featured in: Experience Quotes, Journey Quotes, Meaningful Quotes, Travel Quotes, Quotes About the World

2. “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.”

— Anthony Bourdain

Featured in: Experience Quotes, Perspective Quotes, Moving Quotes, Culture Quotes, Travel Quotes

3. “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.”

— Anthony Bourdain

Featured in: Journey Quotes

4. “Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don’t have.”

— Anthony Bourdain

5. “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.”

— Anthony Bourdain

6. “I don’t have to agree with you to like you or respect you.”

— Anthony Bourdain

7. “Luck is not a business model.”

— Anthony Bourdain

8. “Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.”

— Anthony Bourdain

9. “Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.”

— Anthony Bourdain

10. “Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”

— Anthony Bourdain

11. “Everything important I learned, I learned as a dishwasher.”

— Anthony Bourdain

12. “As a chef I’m not your dietitian or your ethicist, I’m in the pleasure business.”

— Anthony Bourdain

13. “I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to.”

— Anthony Bourdain

14. “Naturally, I’m misanthropic. But the Negronis are helping considerably.”

— Anthony Bourdain

15. “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.”

— Anthony Bourdain

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

— Anthony Bourdain

17. “There is no Final Resting Place of the Mind.”

— Anthony Bourdain

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

— Anthony Bourdain

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

— Anthony Bourdain

20. “An ounce of sauce covers a multitude of sins.”

— Anthony Bourdain

21. “I won’t eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn’t a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.”

— Anthony Bourdain

22. “There is no other place on earth even remotely like New Orleans. Don’t even try to compare it to anywhere else.”

— Anthony Bourdain

23. “The way you make an omelet reveals your character.”

— Anthony Bourdain

24. “No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American.”

— Anthony Bourdain

25. “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you.”

— Anthony Bourdain

26. “There’s something wonderful about drinking in the afternoon. A not-too-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar – even in this fake-ass Irish pub.”

— Anthony Bourdain

27. “To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.”

— Anthony Bourdain

28. “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.”

— Anthony Bourdain

29. “For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we’ve all had to become disappears, when we’re confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.”

— Anthony Bourdain

30. “You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.”

— Anthony Bourdain

Featured in: Romance Quotes

31. “Without new ideas success can become stale.”

— Anthony Bourdain

32. “If I were trapped in one city and had to eat one nation’s cuisine for the rest of my life, I would not mind eating Japanese. I adore Japanese food. I love it.”

— Anthony Bourdain

33. “I’m not going anywhere. I hope. It’s been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

— Anthony Bourdain

34. “It’s that show Friends. Ruined coffee forever.”

— Anthony Bourdain

35. “When my father passed, I was still an unsuccessful cook with a drug problem. I was in my mid-thirties, standing behind an oyster bar, cracking clams for a living when he died. So, he never saw me complete a book or achieve anything of note. I would have liked to have shared this with him.”

— Anthony Bourdain

36. “I can unload my opinion on anybody at anytime.”

— Anthony Bourdain

37. “When dealing with complex transportation issues, the best thing to do is pull up with a cold beer and let somebody else figure it out.”

— Anthony Bourdain

38. “New Orleans is a glorious mutation.”

— Anthony Bourdain

39. “Without Montreal, Canada would be hopeless.”

— Anthony Bourdain

40. “Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.”

— Anthony Bourdain

41. “Turning your nose up at a genuine and sincere gesture of hospitality is no way to travel or to make friends around the world.”

— Anthony Bourdain

42. “Even on the Serengeti, it ain’t a barbecue if there ain’t some kind of beer.”

— Anthony Bourdain

43. “In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.”

— Anthony Bourdain

44. “Don’t lie about it. You made a mistake. Admit it and move on. Just don’t do it again. Ever.”

— Anthony Bourdain

45. “Margarine? That’s not food. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter? I can. If you’re planning on using margarine in anything, you can stop reading now, because I won’t be able to help you.”

— Anthony Bourdain

Featured in: Reading Quotes

46. “This is the dream of all the world. The dream is to live in Granada. You know, work in the morning, have a one-hour nap in the afternoon, and at night go out and have that life. Go out and see your friends and eat tapas and drink red wine and be in a beautiful place.”

— Anthony Bourdain

47. “Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.”

— Anthony Bourdain

48. “People confuse me. Food doesn’t.”

— Anthony Bourdain

49. “I look at Guy Fieri and I just think, ‘Jesus, I’m glad that’s not me.’”

— Anthony Bourdain

50. “I’m at my most productive before I even have my first cup of coffee. I only get slower and stupider as the day progresses.”

— Anthony Bourdain