Top 200 Anthony Bourdain Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “What’s the opposite of suck? Un-suck?”

— Anthony Bourdain

102. “A proper saute pan should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone else’s skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent, the victim’s head or your pan, then throw that pan right in the trash.”

— Anthony Bourdain

103. “My French definitely improves the more I drink, as I worry less and less about absolutely perfect grammar. I do speak and understand the language, just not particularly well.”

— Anthony Bourdain

104. “Too lazy to peel fresh? You don’t deserve to eat garlic.”

— Anthony Bourdain

105. “Just because I like sushi, doesn’t mean I can make sushi. I’ve come to well understand how many years just to get sushi rice correct. It’s a discipline that takes years and years and years. So, I leave that to the experts.”

— Anthony Bourdain

106. “I’m sure one of the frustrations of being a Western enthusiast of Japanese food and culture is you’re confronted every day with the absolute certainty that you will die ignorant.”

— Anthony Bourdain

107. “For me, the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous. But like a love affair, looking back you remember the happy times best –.”

— Anthony Bourdain

108. “I love the saying “Nobody likes a dirty old man or a clean little boy.”

— Anthony Bourdain

109. “I’ve long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we’re talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime ‘associates,’ food, for me, has always been an adventure.”

— Anthony Bourdain

110. “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.”

— Anthony Bourdain

111. “You dropped a 500-seat deuce on Times Square.”

— Anthony Bourdain

112. “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. In.”

— Anthony Bourdain

113. “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.”

— Anthony Bourdain

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

— Anthony Bourdain

115. “There are people with otherwise chaotic and disorganized lives, a certain type of person that’s always found a home in the restaurant business in much the same way that a lot of people find a home in the military.”

— Anthony Bourdain

116. “An employer of mine back in the ’80s was kind enough to take me on after a rough patch, and it made a big difference in my life that I knew I was the sort of person who showed up on time. It’s a basic tell of character.”

— Anthony Bourdain

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

— Anthony Bourdain

118. “This same gag is used by pastry chefs to swirl chocolate or raspberry sauce through creme anglaise and allows them to charge you another three bucks a plate for two seconds of work that you could easily train a chimp to do. But.”

— Anthony Bourdain

119. “Just believe me when I tell you that the city is beautiful – and not in the oppressive way of, say, Florence, where you’re almost afraid to leave your room because you might break something.”

— Anthony Bourdain

120. “Writing anything is a treason of sorts.”

— Anthony Bourdain

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “Life without stock is barely worth living, and you will never attain demi-glace without.”

— Anthony Bourdain

126. “One of my few virtues – I don’t have a lot of them – would be a deep sense of curiosity. I’m interested in how other people live in other places; I’m interested in other cultures.”

— Anthony Bourdain

127. “Cooking is a craft, I like to think, and a good cook is a craftsman – not an artist. There’s nothing wrong with that: the great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen – though not designed by them. Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable and satisfying.”

— Anthony Bourdain

128. “In my house, neither my wife nor my daughter are impressed that I’m on television, and they remind me of that frequently.”

— Anthony Bourdain

129. “I wouldn’t want to compare myself to David Byrne whom I consider a genius, but what I think what we have in common is that he’s also a guy who is very interested in the world and who has a lot of passions beyond singing and playing guitar.”

— Anthony Bourdain

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

— Anthony Bourdain

131. “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

132. “Line cooks are the heroes.”

— Anthony Bourdain

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

— Anthony Bourdain

134. “The roots of creativity of cooking are hungry people trying to figure out how to take something that’s not particularly fresh or tender and transform it into it something delicious that everyone will love.”

— Anthony Bourdain

135. “I am a delightfully evangelical guy about things I love. I am that annoying guy who sits everyone down and forces them to read some book I like. I’m looking across the full spectrum of genres.”

— Anthony Bourdain

136. “I, personally, think there is a really danger of taking food too seriously. Food should be part of the bigger picture.”

— Anthony Bourdain

137. “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

138. “Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.”

— Anthony Bourdain

139. “Always entertain the possibility that something, no matter how squiggly and scary looking, might just be good.”

— Anthony Bourdain

140. “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

141. “Jacques Pepin’s La Technique.”

— Anthony Bourdain

142. “Get up early and go to the local produce markets. In Latin America and Asia, those are usually great places to find delicious food stalls serving cheap, authentic and fresh specialties.”

— Anthony Bourdain

143. “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

144. “Unlicensed hooch from a stranger in a parking lot. Good idea? Yes, of course it is.”

— Anthony Bourdain

145. “What most people don’t get about professional-level cooking is that it is not all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavours and textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking – the real business of preparing the food you eat – is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way.”

— Anthony Bourdain

146. “Hot, salty, crunchy, and portable, the previously awful-sounding collection of greasy delights can become a Garden of Eden of heart-clogging goodness when you’re in a drunken stupor, hungering for fried snacks. At that precise moment, nothing could taste better.”

— Anthony Bourdain

147. “I wanted to write in Kitchenese, the secret language of cooks, instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever dunked french fries for a summer job or suffered under the despotic rule of a tyrannical chef or boobish owner.”

— Anthony Bourdain

148. “I’m a Twitter addict. Jose Andres is a serial tweeter. It’s funny to see which chefs have embraced it, and the different paths they take.”

— Anthony Bourdain

149. “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.”

— Anthony Bourdain

150. “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