“In normal life, ‘simplicity’ is synonymous with ‘easy to do,’ but when a chef uses the word, it means ‘takes a lifetime to learn.’”

The family is the essential presence, the thing that never leaves you, even if you find you have to leave it.

You don’t learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you’re not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.

Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.

The crowd is not us. It never is.

The most important knowledge is understanding what you can’t do.

May was wild asparagus, arugula, and artichokes. June was wild lettuce and stinging nettles. July was cherries and wild strawberries. August was forest berries. September was porcini.

I tried to find a language for the film – not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain.

I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That’s what I try to do all the time.

To share a lot of ideas – not ideas – emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator.

An old woman I loved very much when I was young – the wife of Jean Villard – she’s just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That’s all she does.

Let life unfold, say what you mean.

Men spend their life down here in the worship of petty (or mean) interests and the search of perishable things, and with that (“et avec cela”, Fr.) they pretend to perpetuate for all eternity their self (“moi”, Fr.) so hardly worthy (“digne”, Fr.) of it.

If the preservation of the home means the enslavement of women, economically or morally, then we had better break it.

There are those… who enter the world in such poverty that they are deprived of both the means and the motivation to improve their lot.