Top 44 Gordon Ramsay Quotes

I am the most unselfish chef in Britain today.

I swim like a fish and I have an amazing kick.

As a soccer player, I wanted an FA Cup winner’s medal. As an actor you want an Oscar. As a chef it’s three-Michelin’s stars, there’s no greater than that. So pushing yourself to the extreme creates a lot of pressure and a lot of excitement, and more importantly, it shows on the plate.

I cook, I create, I’m incredibly excited by what I do, I’ve still got a lot to achieve.

Running started as a way of relaxing. It’s the only time I have to myself. No phones or e-mails or faxes.

I shoot from the hip.

I’m not critic-proof, and I still take it personally, but I take it less personally now.

Chefs are nutters. They’re all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.

There is a level of snobbery and fickleness in L.A.

I came up from a difficult background.

I don’t run restaurants that are out of control. We are about establishing phenomenal footholdings with talent.

When you cook under pressure you trade perfection.

Swearing is industry language. For as long as we’re alive it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be boisterous to get results.

I think every chef, not just in America, but across the world, has a double-edged sword – two jackets, one that’s driven, a self-confessed perfectionist, thoroughbred, hate incompetence and switch off the stove, take off the jacket and become a family man.

I didn’t get depressed, I don’t get depressed.

I am a chef who happens to appear on the telly, that’s it.

Would I swap what I have achieved as a cook if I could have been as successful as a footballer? Definitely.

You don’t come into cooking to get rich.

If you want to become a great chef, you have to work with great chefs. And that’s exactly what I did.

I act on impulse and I go with my instincts.

I’ve had a lot of success; I’ve had failures, so I learn from the failure.

I still love football, though, and I think cooking is like football. It’s not a job, it’s a passion. When you become good at it, it’s a dream job and financially you need never to worry. Ever.

When you find a guy who is powerful, a big father figure, you latch onto him immediately.

I’ve never been a hands-on dad. I’m not ashamed to admit it, but you can’t run a restaurant and be home for tea at 4:30 and bath and change nappies.

You know how arrogant the French are – extraordinary.

I’m quite a chauvinistic person.

I’m not trying to take New York by storm. I just want to sneak in there, keep my head down, batten down the hatches and cook.

I don’t like looking back. I’m always constantly looking forward. I’m not the one to sort of sit and cry over spilt milk. I’m too busy looking for the next cow.

I train my chefs completely different to anyone else. My young girls and guys, when they come to the kitchen, the first thing they get is a blindfold. They get blindfolded and they get sat down at the chef’s table… Unless they can identify what they’re tasting, they don’t get to cook it.

Kitchens are hard environments and they form incredibly strong characters.

The problem with Yanks is they are wimps.

I am what I am. A fighter.

I was a naturally aggressive left-back, a cut-throat tackler.

They say cats have nine lives. I’ve had 12 already and I don’t know how many more I’ll have.

I mean, families are weird.

The minute you start compromising for the sake of massaging somebody’s ego, that’s it, game over.

No one saw the recession coming.

When you’re a chef, you graze. You never get a chance to sit down and eat. They don’t actually sit down and eat before you cook. So when I finish work, the first thing I’ll do, and especially when I’m in New York, I’ll go for a run. And I’ll run 10 or 15k on my – and I run to gain my appetite.

My wife, a schoolteacher, very disciplined. If you think I’m tough, trust me, and wait till you see when the children are on the naughty step. It’s hilarious. So we decided that I’m going to work like a donkey and provide amazing support for the family.

It’s very hard when you eat out every day for a living, and a new restaurant comes along and you haven’t got that same vigour that you had 10 years ago.

Find what’s hot, find what’s just opened and then look for the worst review of the week. There is so much to learn from watching a restaurant getting absolutely panned and having a bad experience. Go and see it for yourself.

If I relaxed, if I took my foot off the gas, I would probably die.

The pressure on young chefs today is far greater than ever before in terms of social skills, marketing skills, cooking skills, personality and, more importantly, delivering on the plate. So you need to be strong. Physically fit. So my chefs get weighed every time they come into the kitchen.

There’s a bond among a kitchen staff, I think. You spend more time with your chef in the kitchen than you do with your own family.