When I was growing up, Chef Charlie Trotter inspired me a lot.

My learning from my travels is that taste is objective. If a thing is tasty, it's universally tasty. Or, just not.

I found most of my learning has taken place after culinary college, when I travelled and met chefs and non-chefs.

The thing about innovation is, where do you stop? There are movements across the world where people are asking restaurateurs to bring back the regular plate. So, yes, we are fed up of drinking out of shoes and eating out of hats.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

The most important thing about intellectual property vs. creative expression is that copyright law was created not to stifle creativity but to encourage creativity.

Every human has four endowments - self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.