Paul Theroux Quotes

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

I do like to cook; I'm sort of a mad scientist in the kitchen.

I'm a keen experimenter in the kitchen. With food, not with anything else!

I've cooked just about everything really.

I'm not a trained chef, so I end up making stuff up. It either turns out brilliant or an absolute disaster. I just go for it.

Life isn't a science. We make it up as we go.

It came to me that the one thing I could do was cook. And I figured I couldn't do any worse than the people running these places around town.

I've tried to force a solo before, but sometimes it's like, 'That thing don't really fit, man!'

Music is like cooking for me: you mix the ingredients together in one big pan and see how they end up. Through experimenting, you find what you really like and stick with it.

My favorite way to cook is to look in my cabinets and see what I have. That's the most fun. 'I don't have tomatoes, but I have this chili-garlic sauce from the Asian grocery store. Let's throw that in there and see how it affects my beef barley soup!'

We are comfortable with formulas, but the best happens when the formula doesn't work.

Cooking is the art of adjustment.

Cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music. And cooking draws upon your every talent--science, mathematics, energy, history, experience--and the more experience you have, the less likely are your experiments to end in drivel and disaster. The more you know, the more you can create.

Recipes are overrated.

You just keep playing. If someone special comes along and organizes it in a new way, then you'll have another approach and everybody will jump on it to try to learn.

I love to cook when I have the time. I don't cook French or Mexican food with exact recipes. I just go to the supermarket and buy things that look good, and I mix it all together and invent something. Ninety-five percent of the time, I'm lucky. Sometimes not so lucky, and I say, 'Let's go out to dinner.'

After I had the kids, I took a break from work, and all my creativity went into my kitchen. I like experimenting.

I just find things that work and embellish them.

We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring.

For a long time, nobody had figured out Information Architecture, so we all just made stuff up.

Recently I've been doing risottos. Some of them have been amazing. Some of them, not all of them.

I love food and am very good at improvising when preparing it - it's a really creative experience for me.

My methodology is not knowing what I'm doing and making that work for me.

I wasn't the most confident of cooks, but I just persevered, and I wanted to learn, and I wanted to be a sponge, and I wanted to be better than the next person, and I wanted to learn as much as I could, so I just kept pushing, and it took me a long time actually to be confident in my technique and my ability as a cook.

With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.