Quotes

I like my life. I've had a good life. I think the reason is my parents taught me that life is a burden. But if you take it one day at a time, it's an easy burden.

I have committed my life to helping the poor, and I believe that if more companies followed Wal-Mart's lead in providing opportunity and savings to those who need it most, more Americans battling poverty would realize the American dream.

Everything that has happened in my life is because of good government and because the United States of America was the greatest nation on the face of the earth.

I've been dyslexic and had Attention Deficit Disorder at some time in my life. I still read with a highlighter, but I've always loved to read.

Everything happens in the kitchen. Life happens in the kitchen.

I am grateful to have my life back and for the friends and family who never gave up on me, for a God who was there when I was ready to find him. I am grateful for so much, that every day, one day at a time, is Thanksgiving.

Having been in the restaurant business, our job in the restaurant business is to be responsible for our customers' happiness. It's the nature of the hospitality business. You need to take care of people. You take care of customers above all others. Customers are your lifeblood.

I famously tasted shark fin soup many, many years ago before we understood exactly what was going on with the harvesting of sharks. I've consequently come out against it. I make personal choices in my life and stand behind them.

If there's one thing I've learned after a lifetime of dining on delicacies like blood pudding, sea squirts, and camel kidneys, even folks who wouldn't come within 100 yards of a Cambodian tarantula want to hear what it's like to chomp on one!

I can't tell you how many times I get into a taxicab in New York or Los Angeles, and I'm talking to somebody who is a recent immigrant who was a doctor or lawyer or engineer or professor in the country they just came from. They're starting over again in life, and I think the majority of people out there can relate to that.

The corner of the 'food media' that I think is troublesome to me is the shows on TV that don't really have a point or don't have a lesson to be learned. If you don't have a point, or if there's not some part of it that is meaningful and can change someone's life, in my old age, I'm just not into it.

I don't like being at food festivals and have someone from some weird cable access show that's all about lifestyle get in my face with a microphone and wants to know which party I'm going to later... That just is pointless kind of stuff to me.

When I was 13, I came back from summer camp - summer of '74 - and my mother had had an accident during surgery and was in an oxygen tent in a coma. It was so traumatic. My parents had been divorced for six or seven years at that point, and it was sort of the seminal event of my life.

My life gets better every year.

I think 'Rheingold' has symbolic meaning of what happens in the world when you're running after the Rhine gold, after the gold. It doesn't end very well. It's kind of a reminder of the values of life, and I think 'The Ring,' in a way, is kind of a prediction of Wagner of what would happen in the world.

I think music can change your life.

The two most important things is, one, the music in my life, and the family. It's somehow connected because music is about human beings, about love, about hate, about everything that happens in life.

I think touring is an important part of the life of an orchestra. Not only sharing with other audiences, but bringing that sense of family that you get back home. The sense of growing deeper into the music, of making it all sound like chamber music - that comes from being together on tour.

Music is something so mystical, so unexplainably a thing you cannot put in the rules or boundaries, you know? It speaks about our feelings about questions of life and death. It goes absolutely beyond any kind of rules.

I see, in this life, the hardship many suffer. I see the joy that music can give. How we deal with all this is part of a preparation for the next life.

All composers who came after were influenced by Beethoven, even during his lifetime, both by his personality and by his music. He was a father figure for generations.

We expected that people were just waiting for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least for its retreat, and they were going to be full of initiative in all areas of life - in culture, in economy and in politics.

The difficulty of writing a good theatre play set in new reality was even greater given that the level of similitude to life that is allowed in a film would not work on the stage.

Previously the same Polish audiences would have been pressured into seeing cinema made for adults, films made by us about those spheres of life that were significant for us and which should be significant for our society.

Curiously, a principle affects your life whether you are aware of it or not. For instance, the principle of gravity was working long before the apple ever fell on Newton's head. But once it did, and he understood it, then we as a society were free to harness this principle to create, among other things, airline flight.