Ruth Reichl quotes:

Ask people to pitch in - hand them a spoon and ask them to stir. Doing things together, having everyone help, makes for a nicer party.

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

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

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.

It was through cooking food and sharing it with each other that our ancestors learned how to become social animals.

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.

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.

Hunger, I discovered, is very much a matter of the mind, and as I began to study my own appetites, I saw that my teenage craving had not really been for food. That ravenous desire had been a yearning for love, attention, appreciation. Food had merely been my substitute.

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 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.

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

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

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.

You look at the Barefoot Contessa or Lydia Bastianich, and it's just like watching your mother cooking.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 love to make pies - pot pies, quiches, savory tarts, fruit pies. I use an old-fashioned pastry blender with wires and a wooden handle. I never use a recipe.

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

You can be a decent critic if you know about food, but to be a really good one, you need to know about life.

I'm not a big turkey fan, but my husband loves it. Thanksgiving is his favorite meal.

I've always hated Zagat. If I'm going to listen to someone else's opinions on restaurants, I don't care if I agree or not. I just want to know who they are.

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

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.

I have to say I know much more about football than I would like to, because my husband is a rabid football fan, and it's been so horrible.

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.

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.

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.

A real woman is someone who knows what she wants. If you want to stay home, that's fine, but you have to be clear-eyed.

The first time you make something, follow the recipe, then figure out how to tailor it to your own tastes.

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

That's the most terrible thing about being a child; you're convinced that it's all your fault. Lulu

Anyone who thinks they're too grown up or too sophisticated to eat caramel corn, is not invited to my house for dinner

A thousand years ago the Chinese had an entirely codified kitchen while the French were still gnawing on bones. Chopsticks have been around since the fourth century B.C. Forks didn't show up in England until 1611, and even then they weren't meant for eating but just to hold the meat still while you hacked at it with your knife.

...in the end you are the only one who can make yourself happy. More important, ...it is never too late to find out how to do it.

Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.

I think it's hard, when you're someone who likes to please people, as I am, to be a boss. I had to learn how to rein myself in and not terrify people.

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.

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

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

One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don't know how to do, to keep learning.

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.

When people flatter you constantly it is very tempting to think you deserve it.

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.

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

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

There is that romanticized idea of what a bookstore can be, what a library can be, what a shop can be. And to me, they are that. These are places that open doors into other worlds if only you're open to them.

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.'

The way we live is changing. Each year, our free time shrinks a little more as computers clamor for an increasing percentage of our attention.

My kitchen was built for my body. It forms a 'U' in the middle of the living room and dining room. It's not huge, because I don't like huge kitchens.

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.

If we make it national policy that we will support small farmers the way we support agribusiness, we'll suddenly see it change in terms of the cost of organic food.

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

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.

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

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.

What was so extraordinary to me about going through this box of my mother's letters and diaries was meeting my mother not as my mother, but as a real person. And what breaks my heart is that I had no idea how self-aware she was and how protective of me she was.

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.

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.

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

My mother's name was Miriam, but most people called her Mim.

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

...it was so rich and exotic I was seduced into taking one bite and then another as I tried to chase the flavors back to their source.

Growing up, I was utterly oblivious to the fact that Mom was teaching me all that. But I was instantly aware of her final lesson, which was hidden in her notes and leters. As I read them I began to understand that in the end you are the only one who can make yourself happy. More important, Mom showed me that it is never too late to find out how to do it.

I felt that I was really living in the moment. I did not know where my life was going, but right now the future did not trouble me.

I had done this. I had pulled my life apart. I would never, ever be safe again.

It is not 'only' food, I said heatedly. There's meaning hidden underneath each dish.

Life is so endlessly delicious

Plain fresh bread, its crust shatteringly crisp. Sweet cold butter. There is magic in the way they come together in your mouth to make a single perfect bite.

She was a great cook, but she cooked more for herself than for other people, not because she was hungry but because she was comforted by the rituals of the kitchen.

The single most useful ingredient on the planet. In a pinch you can scramble them and call it dinner. But it only takes five eggs, a little milk and a handful of cheese to make a fat, sassy cheese soufflé.

The strands of spaghetti were vital, almost alive in my mouth, and the olive oil was singing with flavor. It was hard to imagine that four simple ingredients [olive oil, pasta, garlic and cheese] could marry so perfectly.

When a person has lived generously and fought fiercely, she deserves more than sadness at the end.