Norman Douglas Quotes

It's very hard to be an innovator at the highest level in any discipline. For some chefs it's merely about combining ingredients, but that's something you can do with your eyes closed.

The art of the cuisine, when fully mastered, is the one human capability of which only good things can be said.

You don't have to be a chef or even a particularly good cook to experience proper kitchen alchemy: the moment when ingredients combine to form something more delectable than the sum of their parts.

Mother Nature is the true artist and our job as cooks is to allow her to shine.

Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.

Poultry is for the cook what canvas is for a painter, or the cap of Fortunatus for a conjurer.

Cooking is at once one of the simplest and most gratifying of the arts, but to cook well one must love and respect food.

A great artist is not one who merely fits into a genre but one who defines the genre.

[Stanley] Kubrick was a great artist and a perfectionist. He always wanted the exact right thing. He did a million takes. Everything had to be perfect. I'm an imperfectionist. I don't really care that much about the work. I write quickly. I'm careless. I shoot carelessly.

If modern painters feel qualms about applying the term "masterpiece" to describe a work of capital importance, this is because it has come to convey a notion of perfection: a notion that leads to much confusion when applied to artists other than those who made perfection their ideal.

Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.

[I] had gotten to the point where I simply could not make a bad vinaigrette, this was not exactly the stuff of drama. (Even now, I cannot believe Mark would want to risk losing that vinaigrette. You just don't bump into vinaigrettes that good.)

[Vincent Price] had a fish recipe where he wrapped [the fish] in aluminum foil and put in these herbs. And then you put it in the dishwasher and then you wash your dishes, and when you're done, your fish is steamed and it's perfect. But he was very sophisticated as far as art and food and all of that went.

Robert Vavra is one of these artists, part magician, part alchemist, who is able to create a series of photographs in unforgettable compositions. Only visible are the dunes, the blinding fields of flowers and the vast sky, the epic intimacy of Robert Vavra's vision.

Prepared and fast foods have given us the time and freedom to see cooking as an art form - a form of creative expression.

Artists are mostly shits of the worst order. You wouldn't want one living next door to you. Think about it: Vincent Van Gogh living next door, coming over to borrow your ear and a cup of sugar every morning-Good God!

Nobody has a perfect life. What you see on the screen is the best of the artist.

A truly great artist has many talents.

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.

The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.

In intercourse with scholars and artists one readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds: in a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man; and often, even in a mediocre artist, one finds a very remarkable man.

Michael Jackson was extraordinary. When we worked together on 'Bad,' I was in awe of his absolute mastery of movement on the one hand, and of the music on the other. Every step he took was absolutely precise and fluid at the same time. It was like watching quicksilver in motion. He was wonderful to work with, an absolute professional at all times, and it really goes without saying... a true artist. It will be a while before I can get used to the idea that he's no longer with us.

I had a passion for cooking, and I was a very bad student.

How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.

Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature.