Top 200 Anthony Bourdain Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “There has ling been a happy symbiotic relationship between kitchen and bar. Simply put, the kitchen wants booze, and the bartender wants food.”

— Anthony Bourdain

102. “For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous.”

— Anthony Bourdain

103. “No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American. The Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican and Salvadorian cooks I’ve worked with over the years make most CIA-educated white boys look like clumsy, sniveling little punks.”

— Anthony Bourdain

104. “It’s why Ronald McDonald is said to be more recognizable to children everywhere than Mickey Mouse or Jesus. Personally, I don’t care if my little girl ever recognizes those two other guys – but I do care about her relationship with Ronald. I want her to see American fast-food culture as I do. As the enemy.”

— Anthony Bourdain

105. “I need the anesthetic qualities of the local fire water.”

— Anthony Bourdain

106. “I frequently look back at my life, searching for that fork in the road, trying to figure out where, exactly, I went bad and became a thrill-seeking, pleasure-hungry sensualist, always looking to shock, amuse, terrify and manipulate, seeking to fill that empty spot in my soul with something new.”

— Anthony Bourdain

107. “Everyone should be encouraged at every turn to develop their own modest yet unique repertoire – to find a few dishes they love and practice at preparing them until they are proud of the result. To either respect in this way their own past – or express through cooking their dreams for the future. Every citizen would thus have their own specialty. Why can we not do this? There is no reason in the world. Let us then go forward. With vigor.”

— Anthony Bourdain

108. “America’s most dangerous export was, is and always will be our fast-food outlets.”

— Anthony Bourdain

109. “Looking at these photographs, I know that I will never understand the world I live in or fully know the places I’ve been. I’ve learned for sure only what I don’t know – and how much I have to learn.”

— Anthony Bourdain

110. “This, I knew, was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of.”

— Anthony Bourdain

111. “Cream rises. Excellence does have its rewards.”

— Anthony Bourdain

112. “As an art form, cooktalk is, like haiku or kabuki, defined by established rules, with a rigid, traditional framework in which one may operate.”

— Anthony Bourdain

113. “Sometimes the greatest meals on vacations are the ones you find when Plan A falls through.”

— Anthony Bourdain

114. “It’s been about a week without alcohol of any kind. I’m enjoying my new, clean-living lifestyle.”

— Anthony Bourdain

115. “John F. Kennedy said something truly terrifying – guaranteed to make every parent’s blood run cold: “To have a child is to give fate a hostage.”

— Anthony Bourdain

116. “Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park.”

— Anthony Bourdain

117. “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.”

— Anthony Bourdain

118. “Shortcut.’ The word filled me with dread. When has a shortcut ever worked out as planned? The word – in a horror film at least – usually precedes disembowelment and death. A ‘shortcut’ almost never leads to good times.”

— Anthony Bourdain

119. “We are, after all, citizens of the world – a world filled with bacteria, some friendly, some not so friendly. Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald’s?”

— Anthony Bourdain

120. “Look at your waiter’s face. He knows. It’s another reason to be polite to your waiter: he could save your life with a raised eyebrow or a sigh.”

— Anthony Bourdain

121. “Fully feeling the effects of the sake, I was seriously considering burning my passport, trading my jeans and leather jacket for a dirty seersucker suit and disappearing into the exotic East.”

— Anthony Bourdain

122. “Bigfoot understood – as I came to understand – that character is far more important than skills or employment history.”

— Anthony Bourdain

123. “Who can really describe why they fell in love?”

— Anthony Bourdain

124. “Critics have a responsibility to put things in a cultural and sociological or political context. That is important.”

— Anthony Bourdain

125. “I talk about these mysterious forces all the time with my chef cronies. Nothing illustrates them more than the Last Meal Game. You’re getting into the electric chair tomorrow morning. They’re gonna strap you down, turn up the juice and fry your ass until your eyes sizzle and pop like McNuggets. You’ve got one meal left. What are you having for dinner? When playing this game with chefs – and we’re talking good chefs here- the answers are invariable simple ones.”

— Anthony Bourdain

126. “I had always believed that if somebody who worked with me went home feeling like a jerk for giving their time and their genuine effort, then it was me who had failed them – and in a very personal, fundamental way.”

— Anthony Bourdain

127. “People everywhere have been very, very good to me, whether I’m with or without cameras.”

— Anthony Bourdain

128. “We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts.”

— Anthony Bourdain

129. “I am in no way supportive of hunting for trophies or sport – would never do it and don’t like it that others do. But if you kill it, then eat it, it’s fine.”

— Anthony Bourdain

130. “Only desperation can account for what the Chinese do in the name of ‘medicine.’ That’s something you might remind your New Age friends who’ve gone gaga over ‘holistic medicine’ and ’alternative Chinese cures.”

— Anthony Bourdain

131. “So I didn’t have time to craft artful lies and evasions even if I’d wanted to.”

— Anthony Bourdain

132. “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.”

— Anthony Bourdain

133. “Frightened people become angry people – as history teaches us again and again.”

— Anthony Bourdain

134. “It’s a little more, but not much. And, you get conversation, which is something to be savored in Ireland. If you’ve got any kind of a heart, a soul, an appreciation for your fellow man, or any kind of appreciation for the written word, or simply a love of a perfectly poured beverage, then there’s no way you could avoid loving this city.”

— Anthony Bourdain

135. “The new trash who’d suddenly come into money and liked to rub your nose into it? They didn’t care. They didn’t notice. Until one of their own goes ill. Then it’s a sodding emergency. Some privileged prat starts feeling poorly and then it’s call out the Marines, start looking for someone to blame.”

— Anthony Bourdain

136. “When outside forces corrupt the desire to do a job well and take pleasure in the doing. It’s an awful thing to watch. It’s awful when it happens to you.”

— Anthony Bourdain

137. “It feels good knowing you are part of a long and glorious tradition of suffering, insanity, and excess.”

— Anthony Bourdain

138. “One finds oneself being defined by one’s job. The job expiates us from sin; it excuses us our excesses and our lapses. That we are tired, or ill, or in extremis and yet persevere is all we have, sometimes, to sustain our image of ourselves.”

— Anthony Bourdain

139. “How did the age-old equation that poor equals thin and rich equals fat change so that now our working poor are huge and slow-moving and only the wealthy can afford the personal trainers, liposuction, and extended spa treatments required, it seems, to be thin?”

— Anthony Bourdain

140. “In short, marriage, particularly for a woman, was about as much fun as a lingering illness.”

— Anthony Bourdain

141. “It’s not like the idea of washing your hands after visiting the bathroom was some goofy new theory.”

— Anthony Bourdain

142. “How do you instruct a woman who’s already survived incredible hardship, who’s worked hard all her life, on how to live ‘properly’, when your life is, by contrast, a carefree wonderland of excess, sloth and caprice?”

— Anthony Bourdain

143. “We knew well how much these people were paying for cocaine – and that the more coke cost, the more people wanted it. We applied the same market plan to our budding catering operation, along with a similar pricing structure, and business was suddenly very, very, good.”

— Anthony Bourdain

144. “The American woman’s interest does not lie in the man; she wants to be alone, and she can’t be alone without dabbling, today in chemistry, to-morrow in physiology and the day after in Buddhism.”

— Anthony Bourdain

145. “Customers should understand that what they are paying for, in any restaurant situation, is not just what’s on the plate – but everything that’s not on the plate: all the bone, skin, fat, and waste product which the chef did pay for, by the pound.”

— Anthony Bourdain

146. “As incisively pointed out in the documentary Food Inc., an overwhelmingly large percentage of “new,” “healthy,” and “organic” alternative food products are actually owned by the same parent companies that scared us into the organic aisle in the first place. “They got you comin’ and goin’” has never been truer. Like breaking a guy’s leg – so you can be there to sell him a crutch.”

— Anthony Bourdain

147. “Imagine your Aunt Minnie bringing you a plate of cookies as you sat in front of the TV, a string of human molars strung casually, like pearls, around her neck.”

— Anthony Bourdain

148. “Screwups are good. Screwups – and bouncing back from screwups – help you conquer fear.”

— Anthony Bourdain

149. “There is an undercurrent of almost hysterical glee in his descriptions of Mary as a menacing and infectious brute – as if by calling her dangerous and unstable he was mitigating his own failure and fears.”

— Anthony Bourdain

150. “You want to see emotional? Watch a table of ten’s order come back for a refire in a busy all-male kitchen in the middle of the rush. You’ve never seen such weeping and rending of garments and tantrum throwing since you smacked your little brother and took away his favorite stuffed toy.”

— Anthony Bourdain