I'm lucky that I have whatever I had that makes me have a successful career, if you will.

My definition of a good hotel is a place I'd stay at.

I go to Paris, I go to London, I go to Rome, and I always say, 'There's no place like New York. It's the most exciting city in the world now. That's the way it is. That's it.'

I always go back to how people behave. If you watch how people actually behave in a situation, it's very simple and honest and contained. You don't need to use as much expression, as much feeling. Some characters will boil over, and that's another thing, but a lot of times I think you can just do very, very little.

If I have taught my sons anything in life, it is to have integrity - to always tell the truth, and I believe they have.

You cannot write about what people are really like without making a political adjudication. All our ideas of what human nature consists of or how people really feel and experience life are, at their base, political ideas.

The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone.

My journey was never hard; it just happened. From the second I held a knife, from the second I was in culinary school, it's all felt too good to be true. 'This cannot be my job, my life. Somebody has to be kidding with me!'