Top 66 Ruth Reichl Quotes

My mother started out by being a very good girl. She did everything that was expected of her, and it cost her dearly. Late in her life, she was furious that she had not followed her own heart; she thought that it had ruined her life, and I think she was right.

My mother really would make these dreadful concoctions. She really prided herself on something called ‘Everything Stew,’ where she would take everything in the refrigerator, all the leftovers, and put them all together.

My idea of good living is not about eating high on the hog. Rather, to me, good living means understanding how food connects us to the earth.

People are so used to eating terrible pancakes, no matter how you mess up, they’re going to be great. And if you make fresh orange juice, they’ll be over the moon.

It takes a great deal of strength to be an optimist.

I bake bread nearly every day; I use Jim Lahey’s no-knead method and leave it to rise overnight.

To me, cooking is man’s natural activity. But I think writing is really hard. Certainly writing fiction is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

I’m convinced that the main reason we’ve become so obsessed with restaurants is due to our basic need to get out of virtual space and into a real one. We’re not going out to eat merely to share food; we’re there to sit at the same table together, slow down, breathe the same air.

My mother’s father was a doctor, and she desperately wanted to be a doctor.

What often, too often, happens in magazines is that you end up with a great editorial product, and then you’re selling things that you don’t really approve of.

I came from a family where, you know, we sat down at the table every night, and you better have a story to tell. My father never wrote his stories down. And you know, I learned that they went farther if you wrote them down.

The hardest part of cooking is shopping, and if you organize yourself and shop once a week, you’re halfway there.

What does happen in ‘Gourmet,’ we had eight test kitchens, and at any given time, there were, like, ten or twelve test cooks. And whenever anybody finished something, they would yell, ‘Taste!’ and everyone would go running towards it, and then taste, and then brutally deconstruct the dish.

I’ve been to a couple of restaurants in L.A. that were so loud, I left there with a sore throat; you literally could not have a conversation. I think it’s very deliberate: There’s this idea that somehow it’s more fun if there’s a roar in the room.

We in America have gotten addicted to cheap food. The result of that is antibiotic-laden fish, foods that are bred to be portable.

M. F. K. Fisher was a wonder and a huge influence, and someone I got to know pretty well at the end of her life.

What I like best is the challenge of learning something I didn’t know how to do, going beyond my comfort level.

I think of fiction as the highest calling. I’m kind of addicted to it. It’s the thing that has gotten me through all the hard points in my life.

American food is the food of immigrants. You go back a couple of hundred years, and we were all immigrants, unless we’re going to talk about Native American cuisine.

In really good times, you say, ‘No, I’m not taking that ad.’ But in bad times, you’ll take anything.

The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience.

I like poached eggs, but I’ll make scrambled or fried or whatever anybody wants.

One of the things I really love about restaurants is that in many ways, they are the ultimate democratic institutions, where you get to walk in the door, plunk down your money, and for however long that you’re there, you can be anyone you want to be.

The secret to life is finding joy in ordinary things. I’m interested in happiness.

I loved being at the ‘Times,’ and they were incredibly good to me. I think it’s a wonderful paper, and I was really well edited.

The thing I like most in my kitchen is my marble counters. Everybody said not to use marble because it’s fragile, it stains, it cracks, and it doesn’t remain beautiful. But I love marble.

Some magazines are run from the top down, where the editor-in-chief decides what every article is going to be and who’s going to write them, and then they’re doled out. My idea is to do it the opposite way, to do it from the bottom up.

I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you’ve written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer’s memory that filters experience, but the reader’s as well.

For me, cooking is a way to try and please people and tell them I love them. When I fall in love with someone, I want to feed them as well.

By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.

When I came to ‘Gourmet,’ I had no clue how to run a magazine; for television, I am fascinated to learn about editing.

If you really taste a doughnut, it’s pretty disgusting. They taste of grease.

World War II really fascinated me because it’s the only time that everybody in this country sat down at the same table, because eating on rations was your patriotic duty.

If you start with a great peach, there’s nothing you’re ever going to do that’s going to make it any better than when it comes off the tree. In 1970, that was a revolution.

If you’re going to tell stuff, you might as well tell the real stuff.

I don’t care what a lot of anonymous strangers think about restaurants.

The American government policy on what we supported and subsidised in agriculture was a social experiment on a whole generation of children.

Let’s face it: my life tends to revolve around food, and I love feeding people.

I loved writing fiction. I mean, once I found the character, or the characters, and knew who they were and knew their back-stories, it really – I mean, I went into my studio every day, thinking, ‘What’s gonna happen to Billy today?’

The truth is, as much as I loved writing restaurant reviews, it always felt very self-indulgent to me. It was so much fun, I loved doing it, but there’s so much else to say about food.

I learned so much in Laos. I learned that fried silkworm larvae are delicious. I learned how to make ant-egg salad.

Really, the only way to face the biggest problems we have is for the government to change the way they subsidize food. The way we subsidize food makes it cheaper to go to McDonald’s and get a hamburger than a salad, and that’s insane.

Laos is a country where everything is eaten. When I came back, I would find myself chopping parsley and thinking: ‘Why am I throwing these stems away? They’re perfectly edible.’

What I learned is that how we present ourselves to the world is really how we get treated. So if you want to be treated really well in a restaurant, you really have to dress up. You cannot just show up.

I meet people, and we can get past small talk pretty quickly if they’ve read my books. It’s a great shortcut.

Given a choice between great food and boring company or boring food and great company, I’ll take the great company any day.

I think it’s part of the DNA of human beings. We are a cooking animal. What differentiates us from all the other animals is that we cook and they don’t.

I think I wrote my first piece about food in 1978.

Anybody who believes Yelp is an idiot. Most people on Yelp have no idea what they’re talking about.

I don’t have my own garden; we’re on shale and in the woods. And if I did have a garden, the deer and chipmunks and squirrels and bears would eat everything anyway.

I wanted to figure out a way of living where I didn’t have to be in an office every day.

If you have caviar, the way to eat it is by the spoonful. Don’t combine it with shrimp, pomegranate seeds and huitlacoche.

I like to work. I believe that work helps us find our self worth.

I love breakfast, and I don’t see any reason it has to be cereal and eggs and toast.

I’m a home cook, and I’m constantly embarrassed by twentysomethings who really do know the mechanics of cooking. How to build a sauce.

‘Comfort Me with Apples’ is a love story, or better, two love stories. And since it deals with a later period in my life, most of the people who appear in it are living.

I was in Berkeley when the food energy in America was in Berkeley. Then it moved to Los Angeles, and I went to Los Angeles. It moved to New York, and I went there.

My idea of management is that what your job is as the boss is to find really good people and empower them and leave them alone.

Reading an audio book is a very odd experience because there are three people sitting out there while you’re reading in this glass booth, and you can see their reactions.

Sharing food has always had a central place in civilized societies; it’s no accident that so many of our cultural, religious and patriotic rituals are involved with eating.

Anyone who has ever been an ugly adolescent – and we are legion – knows that the feeling of being unlovely and unlovable never goes away; it is always there, lurking just beneath the surface.