Ruth Reichl

“My kitchen was built for my body. It forms a 'U' in the middle of the living room and dining room. It's not huge, because I don't like huge kitchens.”

“If you really taste a doughnut, it's pretty disgusting. They taste of grease.”

“The way we allow children to be advertised to is shocking. Eating is a learned behavior, and we've made these kids sitting ducks for all the bad messages about industrialized food. The fact...”

“I loved being at the 'Times,' and they were incredibly good to me. I think it's a wonderful paper, and I was really well edited.”

“What often, too often, happens in magazines is that you end up with a great editorial product, and then you're selling things that you don't really approve of.”

“I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean...”

“M. F. K. Fisher was a wonder and a huge influence, and someone I got to know pretty well at the end of her life.”

“My mother started out by being a very good girl. She did everything that was expected of her, and it cost her dearly. Late in her life, she was furious that she had not followed her own hear...”

“My idea of good living is not about eating high on the hog. Rather, to me, good living means understanding how food connects us to the earth.”

“When I came to 'Gourmet,' I had no clue how to run a magazine; for television, I am fascinated to learn about editing.”

“One of mom's greatest acts of generosity was that she trained me to be defiant. Her great gift to me was encouraging me to be the person that I wanted to be, not the one that she and my fath...”

“Really, the only way to face the biggest problems we have is for the government to change the way they subsidize food. The way we subsidize food makes it cheaper to go to McDonald's and get...”

“The hardest part of cooking is shopping, and if you organize yourself and shop once a week, you're halfway there.”

“My mother really would make these dreadful concoctions. She really prided herself on something called 'Everything Stew,' where she would take everything in the refrigerator, all the leftover...”

“Anyone who has ever been an ugly adolescent - and we are legion - knows that the feeling of being unlovely and unlovable never goes away; it is always there, lurking just beneath the surface...”

“I'm convinced that the main reason we've become so obsessed with restaurants is due to our basic need to get out of virtual space and into a real one. We're not going out to eat merely to sh...”

“If we make it national policy that we will support small farmers the way we support agribusiness, we'll suddenly see it change in terms of the cost of organic food.”

“The secret to life is finding joy in ordinary things. I'm interested in happiness.”

“People are so used to eating terrible pancakes, no matter how you mess up, they're going to be great. And if you make fresh orange juice, they'll be over the moon.”

“If you start with a great peach, there's nothing you're ever going to do that's going to make it any better than when it comes off the tree. In 1970, that was a revolution.”