Top 200 Anthony Bourdain Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Whatever had the most shock value became my meal of choice.”

— Anthony Bourdain

202. “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

203. “Most jobs, you don’t work, you don’t get paid. You wake up with a sniffle and a runny nose, a sore throat? You soldier on. You put in your hours. You wrap a towel around your neck and you do your best to get through. It’s a point of pride, working through pain and illness.”

— Anthony Bourdain

204. “I believe the words “meat” and “treated with ammonia” should never occur in the same paragraph – much less the same sentence. Unless you’re talking about surreptitiously disposing of a corpse.”

— Anthony Bourdain

205. “If you need instruction on how to handle a knife without lopping off a finger, I recommend Jacques Pepin’s La Technique.”

— Anthony Bourdain

206. “Fine-looking women, smoking and drinking and gambling and doing whatever they like? Sounds good!”

— Anthony Bourdain

207. “But that cold soup stayed with me. It resonated, waking me up, making me aware of my tongue, and in some way, preparing me for future events.”

— Anthony Bourdain

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts ‘fringe elements’, people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong.”

— Anthony Bourdain

212. “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

213. “I like cooking pasta. Maybe it’s that I always wanted to be Italian American in some dark part of my soul; maybe I get off on that final squirt of emulsifying extra virgin, just after the basil goes in, I don’t know.”

— Anthony Bourdain

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

— Anthony Bourdain

215. “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

216. “The bartender is Irish. Jumped a student visa about ten years ago but nothing for him to worry about. The cook, though, is Mexican. Some poor bastard at ten dollars an hour – and probably has to wash the dishes, too. La Migra take notice of his immigration status – they catch sight of his bowl cut on the way home to Queens and he’ll have a problem. He looks different than the Irish and the Canadians – and he’s got Lou Dobbs calling specifically for his head every night on the radio.”

— Anthony Bourdain

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

— Anthony Bourdain

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

219. “After level of skills, it’s how sensitive you are to criticism and perceived insult – and how well you can give it right back – that determines your place in the food chain.”

— Anthony Bourdain

220. “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

221. “Las Vegas no less – the Ugly Shorts Heart of Darkness.”

— Anthony Bourdain

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “But I’m simply not going to deceive anybody about the life as I’ve seen it. It’s all here: the good, the bad and the ugly.”

— Anthony Bourdain

226. “And when you buy a non-stick, treat it nice. Never wash it. Simply wipe it clean after each use, and don’t use metal in it, use a wooden spoon or ceramic or non-metallic spatula to flip or toss whatever you’re cooking in it. You don’t want to scratch the surface.”

— Anthony Bourdain

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “It was not a pretty sight, all these pale, gangly, pimpled youths, in a frenzy of hunger and sexual frustration, shredding bread.”

— Anthony Bourdain

231. “As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system – and it is profoundly upsetting if another cook or, God forbid, a waiter – disturbs your precisely and carefully laid-out system.”

— Anthony Bourdain

232. “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

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

— Anthony Bourdain

234. “He was a crusty old bastard, dressed like my uncle in ancient denim coveralls, espadrilles and beret. He had a leathery, tanned and windblown face, hollow cheeks, and the tiny broken blood vessels on nose and cheeks that everyone seemed to have from drinking so much of the local Bordeaux.”

— Anthony Bourdain

235. “It was a protein rush to the cortex, a clean, three-ingredient high, eaten with the hands. Could anything be better than that? As.”

— Anthony Bourdain

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

— Anthony Bourdain

237. “The tone of the repartee was familiar, as was the subject matter, a strangely comfortable background music to most of my waking hours over the last two decades or so – and I realised that, my God... I’ve been listening to the same conversation for twenty-five years!”

— Anthony Bourdain

238. “Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade.”

— Anthony Bourdain

239. “I make two cook like you in the toilette each morning! You are deezgusting!”

— Anthony Bourdain

240. “This sounds like positive social change, right? Anything the revs are against is surely a good thing. Fine-looking women, smoking and drinking and gambling and doing whatever they like? Sounds good!”

— Anthony Bourdain

241. “Line cooking done well is a beautiful thing to watch.”

— Anthony Bourdain

242. “When I was in Bulgarian paratroopers – we like this plane very much,’ he said. ‘Of course, we were all wearing parachutes.”

— Anthony Bourdain

243. “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

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

— Anthony Bourdain

245. “They’d been running households for years, of course – seeing to the finances, cooking, cleaning, weaving, and in general, doing all those things which men couldn’t, or more accurately, wouldn’t, do.”

— Anthony Bourdain

246. “She doesn’t try to have dignity or refinement. She wants to affect men by what she says, not what she doesn’t say.”

— Anthony Bourdain