Nobu Matsuhisa Quotes

The fine art of preparing sushi is something that you watch and learn.

I'm not making art, I'm making sushi.

Cooking is not a craft to get into for money. The money may come, or it may not. But you must get into it for the craft and the culture.

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.

You know how kids dream of being soccer players or actors? Well, my dream was to be a sushi chef.

My mission in life is to preserve craftsmanship.

I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art.

You should trust any man in his own art provided he is skilled in it.

I care deeply about craft: the quality of how something is made and the experience it enables.

When something is well-crafted, you know it, and the enjoyment comes from experiencing it.

Beauty fades, but cooking is eternal.

The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity.

Art is right reason in the doing of work.

I think that there is a role for food to be art; and when food is art, it can have drama, it can have spectacle, it can be theatrical. It can be this amazing experience.

Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with quality.

Ease and speed in doing a thing do not give the work lasting solidity or exactness of beauty.

The professional respects his craft. He does not consider himself superior to it. He recognizes the contributions of those who have gone before him. He apprentices himself to them.

Cooking is the art of adjustment.

The workmanship was better than the subject matter.

The artist must be like a heart surgeon. He must approach something with sympathy, but with a sort of coldness and work and work until he finds some kind of perfection in his work. You can't have blood splashing all over the place. Things must be done very cleanly.

Making good wine is a skill; making fine wine is an art.

The sum of all technical knowledge cannot make a master contract player.

That which achieves its effect by accident is not art.

To see the butcher slap the steak before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable too - it really was - to see him cut it off so smooth and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of tone, skilful handling of the subject, fine shading. It was the triumph of mind over matter; quite.

The point is to know how to use the colours, the choice of which is, when all's said and done, a matter of habit.