Top 160 Julia Child Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 4

51. “You have to eat to cook. You can’t be a good cook and be a noneater. I think eating is the secret to good cooking.”

— Julia Child

52. “I love good, fresh food cooked by someone who knows what he’s doing.”

— Julia Child

53. “Freshness is essential. That makes all the difference.”

— Julia Child

54. “Always remember: If you’re alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who’s going to know?”

— Julia Child

55. “The dinner hour is a sacred, happy time when everyone should be together and relaxed.”

— Julia Child

56. “How can a nation be called great if its bread tastes like kleenex?”

— Julia Child

57. “Cooking well doesn’t mean cooking fancy.”

— Julia Child

58. “The egg can be your best friend if you just give it the right break.”

— Julia Child

59. “I love root vegetables: carrots, parsnips, and turnips.”

— Julia Child

60. “There is nothing worse than grilled vegetables.”

— Julia Child

61. “There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry- architecture being perhaps the least banal derivative of the latter.”

— Julia Child

62. “Food like love is a deeply emotional matter.”

— Julia Child

63. “It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions.”

— Julia Child

64. “As you get older, you shouldn’t waste time drinking bad wine.”

— Julia Child

65. “Being tall is an advantage, especially in business. People will always remember you. And if you’re in a crowd, you’ll always have some clean air to breathe.”

— Julia Child

66. “How lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly.”

— Julia Child

67. “Remember, you are all alone in the kitchen and no one can see you.”

— Julia Child

68. “If you’re in a good profession, it’s hard to get bored, because you’re never finished – there will always be work you haven’t done.”

— Julia Child

69. “Cassoulet, that best of bean feasts, is everyday fare for a peasant but ambrosia for a gastronome, though its ideal consumer is a 300-pound blocking back who has been splitting firewood nonstop for the last twelve hours on a subzero day in Manitoba.”

— Julia Child

70. “We are so bemused by our own petard, that we are unable to look at things objectively.”

— Julia Child

71. “Well, all I know is this – nothing you ever learn is really wasted, and will sometime be used.”

— Julia Child

72. “But I was a pure romantic, and only operating with half my burners turned on.”

— Julia Child

73. “If variety is the spice of life, then my life must be one of the spiciest you ever heard of. A curry of a life. -Paul Child.”

— Julia Child

74. “It’s simply a very romantic place. Just one look at any of those streets, and you couldn’t be anywhere else – it’s so beautiful, and there’s that location, and the sense of the free spirit. Who couldn’t become ravenous in such a place?”

— Julia Child

75. “There is nothing nicer than a kitchen really made for a cook. Things that are designed to be used always have an innate beauty.”

— Julia Child

76. “I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.”

— Julia Child

77. “I was a romantic, messy thinker. I was raised with very conservative beliefs, but that was a long time ago.”

— Julia Child

78. “My, I get so depressed after a poor meal; that’s why I can never stay in England for more than a week.”

— Julia Child

79. “People liked to eat veal until they saw pictures of these darling little animals with brown eyes. Veal calves been raised the same way for centuries.”

— Julia Child

80. “I discovered that when one follows the artist’s eye one sees unexpected treasures in so many seemingly ordinary scenes.”

— Julia Child

81. “If you’re afraid of butter, use cream.”

— Julia Child

82. “It’s hard to imagine a civilization without onions; in one form or another their flavor blends into almost everything in the meal except the desert.”

— Julia Child

83. “People who are not interested in food always seem rather dry and unloving and don’t have a real gusto for life.”

— Julia Child

84. “Everything can have drama if it’s done right. Even a pancake.”

— Julia Child

85. “I believe in red meat. I often said: red meat and gin.”

— Julia Child

86. “I don’t think about whether people will remember me or not. I’ve been an ok person. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve taught people a thing or two. That’s what’s important.”

— Julia Child

87. “We had a happy marriage because we were together all the time. We were friends as well as husband and wife. We just had a good time.”

— Julia Child

88. “It’s so beautifully arranged on the plate – you know someone’s fingers have been all over it.”

— Julia Child

89. “Always start out with a larger pot than what you think you need.”

— Julia Child

90. “Pro-choice is the only way to be – because women are human beings, after all, and should be treated as such.”

— Julia Child

91. “You don’t spring into good cooking naked. You have to have some training. You have to learn how to eat.”

— Julia Child

92. “An asbestos mat, if necessary.”

— Julia Child

93. “I wouldn’t keep him around long if I didn’t feed him well.”

— Julia Child

94. “Wine is a living liquid containing no preservatives. Its life cycle comprises youth, maturity, old age, and death. When not treated with reasonable respect it will sicken and die.”

— Julia Child

95. “If you’re not ready to fail, you’re not going to learn how to cook.”

— Julia Child

96. “Fake food – I mean those patented substances chemically flavored and mechanically bulked out to kill the appetite and deceive the gut – is unnatural, almost immoral, a bane to good eating and good cooking.”

— Julia Child

97. “Was it a sign of Creeping Decrepitude?”

— Julia Child

98. “The tomato hides its griefs. Internal damage is hard to spot...”

— Julia Child

99. “As we say in the American Institute of Wine and Food, small helpings, no seconds. A little bit of everything. No snacking. And have a good time.”

— Julia Child

100. “Fat gives things flavor.”

— Julia Child