Ruth Reichl

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.

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

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.

There's no buying a greasy breakfast in L.A. - it's all organic juices.

Recently, I was in Bernalda, my dad's ancestral home town in Italy. He has just refurbished a palazzo and turned it into a hotel, so we had my sister's wedding there. It was beautiful.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?