I was painted into a corner. I was completely lost -- I didn't know what I was going to do. I wanted to learn to cook. ... It wasn't until the project was nearly done that I really understood that what I was trying to do was figuring out a new way of living and finding new experiences in life.

It first appealed to me as a book rather than a cookbook. I was a real bookworm and it just seemed sort of mysterious and adult and slightly dangerous.

Which just goes to show, I guess, that dinner parties are like everything else - not as fragile as we think they are.

If there's a sexier sound on this planet than the person you're in love with cooing over the crepes you made for him, I don't know what it is.

If I had thought the beef marrow might be a hell of a lot of work for not much difference, I needn’t have worried. The taste of the marrow is rich, meaty, intense in a nearly-too-much way. In my increasingly depraved state, I could think of nothing at first but that it tasted like really good sex. But there was something more than that, even. What it really tastes like is life, well lived. Of course the cow I got marrow from had a fairly crappy life – lots of crowds and overmedication and bland food that might or might not have been a relative. But deep in his or her bones, there was a capacity for feral joy. I could taste it.

I graduated from college with a major in fiction writing, and then I spent years and years and years just writing and not ever finishing anything and really falling into the black hole of self-loathing.