If I have committed any culinary atrocities, please forgive me.

You know the great irony is that people think you have to have money to enjoy fine food, which is a shame.

My place in Chicago is a 105 year old house, but I really like contemporary spaces too, so it's refreshing and fun to be in a space where you can do contemporary things.

I like to have friends in the kitchen and make a big mess and use every pot in the kitchen.

However, I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire, and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.

The great mystery to me is how restaurant critics think they can get away with doing their job without anybody noticing who they are.

Thom is one of those wonderful people to cook for because he absolutely loves it, just loves it. He loves to eat and drink and he'd be a great guest at any dinner party.

My whole problem is that all of my favorite things at Thanksgiving are the starches, and everyone is trying to go low-carb this year, even a green vegetable has carbs in it.

It's very important to me that people who are actual chefs and other professionals in the culinary world, understand that I'm not, and have never held myself out as being, like a CIA trained chef.

I had a really good time with Martha Stewart, who also is somebody I really admire a lot. I've learned a lot from her and I think all of America has, about attention to detail and using fresh ingredients and making things beautiful and special.

I went in saying I wanted to be the food guy.

Well, we don't take money from people and then show the product. It has to be a product that we like anyway, and that's true for all five of us, which is one of the really nice things about the way we make the show.

If I have committed any culinary atrocities, please forgive me.

Because the show is popular, people do recognize us on the streets.

I cook everything. I love Mediterranean cooking, I love Asian cooking. I do lots of Japanese noodles.

For each episode the five of us are all wearing clothes by the same designer. It's a different designer for each episode, but for each one we're all wearing their clothes.

No, Queer Eye has a book coming out before mine, in the Spring of 2004, in which each of us has a section and we do a brief overview of our subject area.

I really have a great deal of humility in that department, and a great deal of respect for people who spend their lives learning how to make these amazing preparations.

I'm in a loft and the kitchen is in the very center of the apartment. The whole place revolves around it.

In actuality, there was casting for the show and it was pretty difficult.

Jay Leno is not a guy who likes change. He eats the same food every day.

What I bring to the table is a huge enthusiasm and love for this stuff.

I've leased the apartment; my partner is going to come out here. But we're keeping our house in Chicago because real estate is a really good investment and also because it is just crammed with full of stuff!

Sesame oil is probably my favorite condiment, period.

I think that curiosity happened on these reviews where I was just a guest of the reviewer, because it introduced me to new cuisines and to the idea of cooking as a mechanism for studying other cultures and understanding other parts of the world.

I am much more interested in the process than results.

Oh, did I tell you I have a cookbook? I have a cookbook deal.

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a form of service journalism. To be successful, I think it has to be a combination of a good story, it has to be funny, and it also needs to be packed with useful information.

I had a little epiphany when I was a writer at 'Chicago' magazine. I sat down to dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. Somebody poured a white dessert wine with chocolate cake. It was a wine I would never have expected to make sense. The idea of any wine tasting fabulous with chocolate cake was fascinating to me.

Baking is problematic for me because I usually drink a lot of wine when I cook

People want honest flavourful food not some show off meal that takes days to prepare.

To me, the kitchen is a place of adventure and entirely fun, not drudgery. I can't think of anything better to do with family and friends than to be together to create something.

The funny thing about Thanksgiving, or any big meal, is that you spend 12 hours shopping for it, then go home and cook, chop, braise, and blanch. Then it's gone in 20 minutes and everybody lies around sort of in a sugar coma, and then it takes four hours to clean it up.

I play piano and I sing. But I do that for fun. I mean, I do everything for fun.

Unfortunately, I suffer from insomnia, so my bedtime is as soon as I start to feel the least bit sleepy.

Out of the depths, O Lord, out of the depths,' begins the most beautiful of the services of our church, and it is out of the depths of my life that I must bring the incidents of this story.

Duh! So, we're asking you now, what are some of your favorite lines that this warlock brain produced?

There are very few things that are purely conceptual without any hard content.

I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.

California is a place where they shoot too many pictures and not enough actors.

Catherine Keener really gets me. She and I have such a shorthand together.

I think a craft becomes an art form when the space of possible solutions becomes so huge that engineering can't carry you through.

I didn't want to get attached to one guitar; I didn't want to have an instrument that was irreplaceable.

God works powerfully, but for the most part gently and gradually.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

I believe that there are many herbs and many trees that are worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines; but I do not know, and this causes me great sorrow. Arriving at this cape, I found the smell of the trees and flowers so delicious that it seemed the pleasantest thing in the world.

I don't really watch many heist movies. Actually, I have quite eclectic tastes, but I tend to watch just foreign films. I don't know why that is. I'm not particularly deep or anything, I just like foreign movies.

I think we live in a world where the most important thing is daily life: sharing a space with your family, making meals, being with your people. It's not only the idea of privacy, it's the beauty of the moment, at a time in the world when everything goes really fast - too fast.

A lot of my friends hate my music. I have weird taste.