Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.

Food is the main engine that drives connectedness, relationship in Chinese society.

Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.

We're social beings, and food is one of the things we can use three times a day to connect with family or with friends.

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.

Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.

Food is a gift and should be treated reverentially--romanced and ritualized and seasoned with memory.

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.

Food imaginatively and lovingly prepared, and eaten in good company, warms the being with something more than the mere intake of calories. I cannot conceive of cooking for friends or family, under reasonable conditions, as being a chore.

In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal.

Food is such an important part of our lives, and sometimes we tend to diminish the importance of that, because we rely on conveniences or because our lives are so complicated. We forget about those moments that we can actually share around the table with our family, with our friends, with our loved ones.

The sharing of food is like breaking bread, it's very symbolic.

Cooking is a holistic process of planning, preparing, dining and sharing food. I place food at the center of our humanity, as it nourishes not only our physical bodies but also our emotional and spiritual lives. Food is truly a cultural phenomenon that informs our traditions and our relationship with the earth. I genuinely believe that food connects us all.

It is not 'only' food, I said heatedly. There's meaning hidden underneath each dish.

Tasting a dish should be memorable If nothing remains in the memory of a single guest, then I have made a mistake.

I am beguiled by your physical beauty, and I am moved by how head-over-heels in love with books you are. And nowhere else have I found such thoughtful and literate reportage on the state of the American soul, as that soul makes itself known in the books we write.

My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn't understand what you're writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. Irrelevant. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I've failed.

I see caring for somebody as a creative outlet. I like drawing little faces and writing little stories and hiding them in places. I don't think it's that hard to be thoughtful, especially when you do care about the person.

Food is the only beautiful thing that truly nourishes.

Ultimately, I realized that in order to write about food you need to understand everything about cooking, so I moved to New York and enrolled in the Institute of Culinary Education.

Food is one of the great organizing tools.

OYSTER, n. A slimy, gobby shellfish which civilization gives men the hardihood to eat without removing its entrails! The shells are sometimes given to the poor.

The food to me is just a hook, it's a button, it happens to be the social construct and the cultural totem that I'm most familiar with. So of course I built the show around food because it's where I'm familiar.