Anthony Bourdain Quotes

There were two very distinct voices going on in my head and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life and establishing myself as a male... The other voice, the one I had from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature.

I went to a Catholic school, so of course we had to wear uniforms. My only form of expression was in shoes and the style of my hair.

People define themselves aesthetically at a very young age.

I played baseball in college but I didn't identify with the jocks, I was in my own little world .

When I was growing up, I didn't really have a lot of different things I could wear. As I got older, the more I could look different on an everyday basis, the better.

I spent a lot of time in college. I was just being academic and discovering myself through reason and analysis.

I think I created my particular stage persona out of my dad's life. And perhaps I even built it to suit him to some degree. I was looking for - when I was looking for a voice to mix with my voice, I put on my father's work clothes, as I say in the book, and I went to work.

That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.

I was in college - Carnegie Mellon, which is one of the reasons Pittsburgh was appealing to me - and I personally feel that whole world of what we used to call "college radio" is a big part of what kept me sane through a period where I stopped dating, I felt like a freak, I felt like no girl would like me. You know, a very adolescent response to losing my hair. I turned to obsessing about The Replacements and The Smiths and R.E.M. and getting further into The Velvet Underground. People who, in my sheltered suburban life, I knew of, but didn't know fully.

[Margot Hentoff] stopped [writing]. She decided that she had nothing more to say. And yet, every day, she has a whole lot to say, and I wish she'd write it down.

I've been a writer since I was 16. I didn't get published until I was 24. I know that sounds crazy.

I don't believe there's a certain age where you can't say and feel and be who you want to be.

Your personality is something that you created. Once you are aware of that, you could create it whichever way you want.

The purpose of a relationship is to decide what part of yourself you'd like to see 'show up', not what part of another you can capture and hold.

I've written and translated my own poems from English to German. It's basically a summation of my identity as it stands now.

If you dress up, it helps your personality to emerge - if you choose well.

When I was a kid in San Diego, I would read fashion magazines and Interview magazine, and all of that really inspired me to create a persona. So by the time I moved to New York, in the early '80s, I'd learned how to create a persona, and I knew what my persona would be.

Pose? I don't pose. What am I? Paris Hilton or something?

My way of finding a place in this world is to write one.

When I used to teach writing, what I would tell my playwriting students is that while you're writing your plays, you're also writing the playwright. You're developing yourself as a persona, as a public persona. It's going to be partly exposed through the writing itself and partly created by all the paraphernalia that attaches itself to writing. But you aren't simply an invisible being or your own private being at work. You're kind of a public figure, as well.

If you're trying to be hip, be hip.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.

Hair is vitally personal to children. They weep vigorously when it is cut for the first time; no matter how it grows, bushy, straight or curly, they feel they are being shorn of a part of their personality.

The secret of life is in art.