Go to the grocery store and buy better things. Buy quality, buy organic, buy natural, go to the farmers market. Immediately that's going to increase the quality of the food you make.

Recipes are important but only to a point. What's more important than recipes is how we think about food, and a good cookbook should open up a new way of doing just that.

In deference to American traditions, my family put our oven to rare use at Thanksgiving during my childhood, with odd roast-turkey experiments involving sticky-rice stuffing or newfangled basting techniques that we read about in magazines.

I like to say, 'Chop suey's the biggest culinary joke that one culture has ever played on another,' because chop suey, if you translate into Chinese, means 'tsap sui,' which, if you translate back, means 'odds and ends.'

It's part of the American experience: We deal with mosquitoes in August, airport delays around Thanksgiving, expensive health care and the potential of being shot, at any time, by a semiautomatic weapon as we try to go about the most boring, precious, asinine aspects of our daily lives.

I'm blessed to come from a family with five brothers. We're all physical and athletic and like to work out, like to be outside, like to throw the ball around. We spent our entire childhoods on some kind of corner or in a field. We still do a Turkey Bowl every Thanksgiving. It gets competitive, man. Bloody.

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.

Not to sound too much like Christopher Guest in 'Waiting for Guffman,' but on Thanksgiving you're putting on a show!

I'm a home cook and love to read about food, but I'm not trained as a chef. I'm just really into cooking and passionate about it.

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

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I took time to reflect on what is most important to me and realized I need to find a way to put the fun back into racing.

I know, especially in my family, people's feelings get hurt over the tiniest things. I'm sure that's true in every family. But, for instance, one year, I came a little bit late to Thanksgiving, and I was supposed to bring a salad. And I just brought a bag of lettuce, and put it in a bowl. Five years later, I heard that my mom was incensed.

It's how you define yourself. It's not Nirvana or Pearl Jam: it's, 'Do you watch 'Portlandia' or 'Amy Schumer'?' It relates to a specific sense of humor. And, 'Do you know the hidden gems?' Like, if you knew the Pixies in the '80s.

The craft Emmys are kind of the kids' table at Thanksgiving. You're not really invited to the big dance. It's still really, really exciting, and the statue still counts.

Getting over someone is a grieving process. You mourn the loss of the relationship, and that's only expedited by 'Out of sight, out of mind.' But when you walk outside and see them on a billboard or on TV or on the cover of a magazine, it reopens the wound. It's a high-class problem, but it's real.

Being funny with a funny voice is more my comfort zone, a broader character that I try to humanize, a kind of silly or wacky persona that I try to fill in.

Holiday binge-buying has deep roots in American culture: department stores have been associating turkey gluttony with its spending equivalent since they began sponsoring Thanksgiving Day parades in the early 20th century.

When you see a merger between two giants in a declining industry, it can look like the financial version of a couple having a baby to save a marriage.

My mom makes something called green pie, which I thought was a delicacy that many people only had at Thanksgiving, but it turns out it was just Jell-O with whipped cream on it. And it's delicious.

Thank God for YouTube. Every Thanksgiving, I'm bombarded with 'Turkey Lurkey Time.'

I make a fabulous tofurkey for Thanksgiving. My Mexican-Italian family can't tell the difference.

I'm not from the States, so Thanksgiving, for me, was never a huge tradition.

When I first sat down with my oncologist the day before Thanksgiving, and she told me I would need 8 rounds of chemo, one of my first questions admittedly was: 'Will I lose my hair?' It sounds shallow, I know, but it was a very scary image to me.

You don't have to live on a farm to have chickens; in some places, you just need a little bit of green space and a tidy chicken coop. To me, they're nearly ideal pets. They feed us more often than we feed them! We have 2 chickens, Goldie and Paprika, and they each produce 1 egg a day, sometimes more.

I miss both of my parents terribly every day, but especially as we approach Thanksgiving. We always came together as a family for that holiday, playing capture the flag and touch football and laughing a lot.

In our family, mom and dad are Longhorns, our first two kids are Aggies and we're hoping our last one is a Longhorn. It gives us family fun on Thanksgiving Day.

I have nothing against turkey. We eat turkey for Thanksgiving in my house.

The kitchen is a sacred space.

Dear Lord; we beg but one boon more: Peace in the hearts of all men living, peace in the whole world this Thanksgiving.

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

Life is all about having a good time.

It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill.

The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who... looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space... on the infinite highway of the air.

I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine. I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then, if possible, add my mite to help on the future worker who will attain final success.

When people rely on surface appearances and false racial stereotypes, rather than in-depth knowledge of others at the level of the heart, mind and spirit, their ability to assess and understand people accurately is compromised.

Pleasure is a shadow, wealth is vanity, and power a pageant; but knowledge is ecstatic in enjoyment, perennial in frame, unlimited in space and indefinite in duration.

Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come.

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.

To unfold the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matured, is a object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind.

Data is the fabric of the modern world: just like we walk down pavements, so we trace routes through data, and build knowledge and products out of it.

Yes. I'm a doctor, an epidemiologist, and lots of my professional colleagues flip back and forth between industry and medical roles. I know them; they are not bad people. But it is possible for good people in bad systems to do things that inflict enormous harm.

If you put me in charge of the medical research budget, I would cancel all primary research, I would cancel all new trials, for just one year, and I would spend the money exclusively on making sure that we make the best possible use of the clinical evidence that we already have.

There is no philosophy which is not founded upon knowledge of the phenomena, but to get any profit from this knowledge it is absolutely necessary to be a mathematician.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

The pursuit of natural knowledge, the investigation of the world - mental and material - in which we live, is not a dull and spiritless affair: rather is it a voyage of adventure of the human mind, a holiday for reckless and imaginative souls.

Kindliness and sympathy, fellowship and understanding, are always good, but best when they come from a distant corner of the world.

Is it right to probe so deeply into Nature's secrets? The question must here be raised whether it will benefit mankind, or whether the knowledge will be harmful.

The introduction of many minds into many fields of learning along a broad spectrum keeps alive questions about the accessibility, if not the unity, of knowledge.

Behind the man is the Tree of Life, bearing twelve fruits, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is behind the woman; the serpent is twining round it.